Economy

It sometimes feels like every regulatory body in Britain today misuses its influence to advance progressive causes. A welcome exception is the Financial Conduct Authority, which last week decided to allow firms to choose whether they use sex or gender as the definition of ‘woman’ for reporting on their representation on corporate boards. It is clearly not the role of a financial services regulator to attempt to define ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Out of 540 responses to a consultation on the matter, all but one said they did not want trans women to be automatically included in the targets and data. As the group Sex Matters has pointed out, there is

Any Conservative who doubts that Labour’s promise to abolish non-dom status could seriously damage the government needs to look at the fate of Rishi Sunak. So recently the heir apparent to the Tory leadership, Sunak has this week plunged to bottom in a poll of the most popular cabinet members. It comes, of course, just a couple of weeks after the revelation that Sunak’s wife was living in Britain as a non-dom – a status which according to one estimate could have saved her up to £20 million in tax over the years. And this was a poll of Conservative party members, so goodness knows how much the revelation has

The latest warning was stark – that China’s population will shrink this year, more than a decade faster than forecast, and the country will become a ‘super-aged’ society by 2035. The economic implications will be a ‘huge thing’. This came not from what Beijing has dismissed as ‘western doomsayers’, but from Zheng Bingwen, director of the Center for International Social Security Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and one of China’s most respected observers of population trends. He said the ratio of pensioners to workers will rise to 25 per cent in 2030, is expected to exceed 43 per cent in 2050, and is happening much faster compared

This morning’s retail sales update isn’t pretty. Sales volumes fell by 1.4 per cent last month, following a 0.5 per cent drop in February (revised, and worse, than the original estimate of 0.3 per cent). The biggest fall came in non-store retail shopping: almost an 8 per cent month-on-month fall. However, the Office for National Statistics points out that overall sales volumes are still roughly 20 per cent higher now than they were pre-pandemic. But the recent drop indicates that the cost-of-living crisis is already worsening, as inflation – now at 7 per cent – is taking its toll on real incomes and is already prompting changes in consumer behaviour.

I spent Easter agonising over whether to throw the considerable weight of this column behind Elon Musk’s maverick $43 billion bid for Twitter. One thing I didn’t do, however, was consult the multitude of opinions on the matter available via Twitter itself, because I’m afraid I regard it as a satanic cacophony of misinformation and vanity. If that puts me in the position of the late-15th-century scholar who said ‘Printing presses? Pah! The only news I trust is handwritten by monks’, so be it. But when I read Musk’s claim that ‘civilisational risk’ would be decreased by his sole ownership of the ubiquitous microblogging site, I laughed out loud. Not

This time last year, Netflix was fêted as the future of television. Its subscriptions grew by 30 per cent over 2020 as people bought in entertainment during lockdown. Netflix always warned that its growth would slow afterwards and the market seemed to accept that. But its shares have halved since their mid-November peak after a radical reappraisal of its fortunes. What’s going on? Those shares plunged 27 per cent in pre-market trading when Netflix said that, rather than see growth slowing to a mere 2.5 million more subscribers as it had expected for the first three months of this year, it has entered decline – actually losing 200,000 subscribers. A small dent on its

Colombo, Sri Lanka Some 13 years after the end of a civil war that saw 100,000 deaths, Sri Lanka is once again on the cusp of serious violence. Earlier today, the police opened fire on protesters in the town of Rambukkana. One person has died and at least ten people are said to be in critical condition. It’s the first use of deadly force against demonstrators who seem to have filled the entire island in recent weeks. Grainy footage shows half-conscious bodies being carried into hospital, bullet casings littering the quiet palm-lined streets. This was meant to be a time of celebration. Buddhists are marking the new year while the

Remember how David Cameron’s government was going to end Nimbyism by having local communities vote for new housing developments on their doorsteps? That didn’t end so well. Last October, following a shock defeat in the Amersham by-election, the Prime Minister gave up on building more new homes in the shires in favour of reverting to the line of least political resistance: the old favourite of trying to solve the housing shortage by building more new homes on brownfield land in the North. Why, then, does the government think it will be any more successful trying to persuade us to accept wind farms on our doorsteps? Last week’s Energy Security Strategy

So, it’s official. The global rating agency S&P has determined that the Russian government has defaulted on part of its international debt. In itself, this is not as big a deal as it may sound. Nonetheless, the circumstances have revived concerns about the future of the US dollar as the reserve asset of choice for central banks around the world. Russia is now judged to be in ‘selective default’ because it has attempted to repay holders of two US dollar-denominated bonds with Russian roubles. At the very least, this is a technical breach of the terms of the debt. It will also probably lead to some material losses for bondholders,

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index rose 13 per cent last month to stand a third higher than a year ago. Within the index, cereals rose by 17 per cent – driven by interrupted Ukrainian and Russian wheat supplies – and vegetable oils by 23 per cent, Ukraine being the world’s biggest sunflower farmer. In the UK, wholesale milk is up 20 per cent, as farmers face rising fuel and feed costs. Supermarkets squeeze suppliers to suppress retail prices: but soon, around the same time as our next quarterly gas bills, we’ll feel the full impact at the checkout. And then what? We may be on the

No. 10 was an endless series of parties. The Chancellor was more interested in socializing than sorting out the economy. And the Prime Minister was imposing rules on everyone else that he cavalierly ignored himself. It remains to be seen whether Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak can survive the fines handed out for breaking the lockdown rules and the public anger over their behaviour. And yet, in reality, there is a far larger lockdown scandal and one that will cause far more lasting political damage: inflation. The ‘partygate’ scandal, and its fallout, has distracted attention from yet another sobering set of inflation statistics. Today we learned that prices are now rising

How tempting it must be for Rishi Sunak to chuck in his job as Chancellor. ‘My chances of ever becoming PM have plummeted to next to nothing,’ he must be thinking, ‘so why not go off and earn some serious money instead, away from the spotlight?’  I have no insight into the state of the Sunak marriage but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was also tempted to resign for his wife’s sake. ‘Let’s get out of the public eye,’ he might well be tempted to say, ‘and enjoy being rich again.’ But if Rishi had hired me for some advice on reputation management I would give him a better

It could be Kwasi Kwarteng, the business minister. Or Nadhim Zahawi, the education minister, and before that the minister who helped make the vaccine roll-out such a success. Or perhaps Sajid Javid will even get his old job back. With an investigation opening into his financial affairs, and with questions over his judgment growing by the day, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak is increasingly damaged goods. It won’t be long before there is speculation about who will get the second most important job in British politics. But hold on. It doesn’t matter so much who moves into No. 11. What is important is that the next Chancellor clears out Sunak’s policies

How is the UK’s economic bounce back from the pandemic years going? Next week the Office for National Statistics will provide us with a host of new monthly data, including an economic growth and labour market update for the month of February and the headline inflation rate for March. The inflation rate is the real kicker. While GDP and labour market headlines from February will allow us to further gauge how strong the economy was at the start of the year, March’s CPI rate will factor the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This has undoubtedly had an impact on prices: the cost of energy, in particular.  There’s little doubt