Bond yields are soaring to their highest levels in almost 30 years and sterling is sliding, but the Chancellor is nowhere to be seen. Where is Rachel Reeves and why won’t she address the markets her failed Budget has spooked, asks Matthew Lynn in the Spectator.
The Government’s economic strategy is facing its first real test, and where is the Chancellor? So far Rachel Reeves has been silent, preparing for a jaunt to China. At some point Reeves will have to address the markets – or risk turning a round of jitters into a full-blown crisis.
Over the last few days, the markets have turned decisively on the U.K. Yesterday, the yield on 10-year gilts hit its highest level since the financial crisis of 2008, while the yield on the 30-year gilt hit the highest level for 30 years. The U.K. is now paying more to service its debt than Greece, and very soon that will mean rising mortgage rates, and more companies going bankrupt. There is no mystery about what has happened. Investors have worked out that Reeves’s Budget, with its mix of big increases in borrowing, and higher company taxes, has failed, and will trap the economy in stagnation. The result? They are demanding more to lend money to the U.K.
Worth reading in full.
Meanwhile, Liz Truss has sent a cease and desist letter to Keir Starmer demanding that he stops claiming she crashed the economy, calling it “false and defamatory”. Her lawyers cite a report from economist Andrew Lilico, who tells the Telegraph that far from crashing the economy, “the thing that happened immediately following the mini-Budget was that the economy performed well”:
It’s not as though the economy was expected to go really fast and Liz Truss made it go a little bit slower than was expected. The thing that happened immediately following the mini-Budget was that the economy performed well. So it’s just preposterous to claim that she crashed the economy. Exactly the opposite happened. The economy did better than had been expected.
So Truss didn’t crash the economy, but Rachel from Accounts has.
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“harrassment” “alarm” “distress” “offence” etc etc etc. All totally subjective. They can mean different things to different people at different time and different places, depending on who said what and maybe based on your personal opinion of that individual etc etc. ———In other words a total clutter of nonsense and a waste of everyone’s time. ———You can only be offended with your own consent.