Money

Has the immigration U-turn already begun? When Home Secretary James Cleverly announced his overhaul of the legal migration system at the start of the month, it included a big crackdown on the family visa route into the UK. The Minimum Income Requirement (MIR) for a British citizen wanting to bring their foreign spouse to the UK was set to rise from £18,200 to £38,700 – a threshold thousands of pounds above the median salary in the UK. But in the small print of the ‘legal migration statement’ released last night by the Home Office, we learn that the MIR has been watered down significantly. Instead of more than doubling the salary threshold, the new

Anyone for more tax cuts in the spring budget? You might as well hand out free beer. For many Conservatives, tax cuts provide the last tiny chink of light before the door closes on their electoral prospects for good. This month’s government borrowing figures might just provide some encouragement, too. Net borrowing in November was £0.9 billion lower than it was in November 2022. The great bulge in the deficit which came with Covid seems finally to be subsiding. With inflation falling sharply, too, the outlook for the public finances begins to look a little brighter. The UK government has an unusually large slice of its debt in index-linked debt,

Covid provided a revelation of the vulnerabilities of the global supply chain, but now war in Yemen has provided another. Attacks on shipping by Iranian-backed Houthis has reminded the world of how much trade is reliant on free passage through the Bab-al-Mandeb Strait, an 18-mile wide waterway at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. If shipping cannot get through that then it struggles to get through the Suez Canal. In the past month, 15 ships have been attacked in the strait with missiles and drones, and now shipping lines have had enough. They are instead routing their container vessels an extra 3,000 miles around the Cape of Good Hope. That

The Bank of England has held interest rates at 5.25 per cent for the third consecutive time. This was the expected outcome of the Monetary Policy Committee’s latest vote, but it wasn’t unanimous. There were six MPC votes to hold rates but three to raise it to 5.5 per cent. No one voted to cut. This speaks to the biggest challenge the Bank faces right now: how to balance getting the inflation rate back to target without tipping the economy into recession. But markets expect the next movement to be downwards – so much so that mortgage rates are already falling in anticipation. The MPC today urges markets not to get ahead of themselves

So, a deal has been reached. The world has agreed on what Cop 28 president Sultan al-Jaber has called a ‘robust action to keep 1.5 Celsius in reach’. The world is to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. And meanwhile, back in the real world? If the world really had just made a meaningful commitment to end the use of fossil fuels, you might have expected shares in oil companies to have crashed this morning. But have they heck. Shell, BP, all are unmoved. It is expansionary business as usual. The UAE has invested $150 billion (£120 billion) to increase oil production by half to five million barrels a day by 2027. In the

The jobs market appears to be slowing down, but can we trust the figures? Vacancies have fallen for the longest continuous period on record, according to data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). But there are still just under 950,000 jobs on offer which is well above the pre-lockdown norm. Meanwhile, despite British workers receiving real-terms pay rises in the three months to October, wage growth seems to have peaked. This will please Bank of England rate setters who feared that spiralling wage demands could worsen inflation. Average weekly earnings (including bonuses) fell slightly to 7.2 per cent on the year, down from 8 per cent. Because of

The UK’s immigration system must be ‘fair, consistent, legal and sustainable’, proclaimed the new Home Secretary as he presented his ‘five-point plan’ to reduce legal migration in parliament. James Cleverly billed these changes as ‘more robust action than any government’ has taken before to reduce the headline net migration figure.  They involve increasing the skilled worker earnings threshold from £26,200 to £38,700 from next spring; increasing the NHS surcharge (paid every time most migrants secure or renew their visa), from £624 to £1,035; ending the 20 per cent salary reduction for shortage occupations (as well as reforming and reducing the list); increasing the minimum salary for a family visa to

Rishi Sunak has a new approach to Net Zero, defining himself against ‘zealots’ and acknowledging the side effects of proposed green taxes. He’s replacing the old, often hyperbolic precautionary-principle logic and bringing in the language of tradeoffs: stressing the importance of democratic consent and the futility of green taxes that voters will not accept and are likely to rebel against. The Prime Minister has just taken his case to the UN ‘Cop’ Climate Summit in Dubai and his short speech deserves more attention than it has received. The standard form, in such events, is for leaders to try to outdo each other in ‘dark green’ jeremiads and say ‘we’ must

When Jeremy Hunt announced his ‘Autumn Statement for Growth’ last week, there was a slight problem: the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had actually revised down its growth forecasts. Apart from this year and the last year for the forecast, GDP gains are expected to be smaller than were predicted back in March. Yes, the government can still technically say it is making good on its pledge to ‘grow the economy’ — but best of luck to any minister who stands up and sincerely insists that 0.6 per cent or 0.7 per cent growth is something to boast about. The OBR is not, of course, the only forecaster. There are

It largely slipped under the radar, but there was a rare bit of good news for hard-pressed consumers and businesses this week: the next meeting of Opec+, originally scheduled for today, has been pushed back almost a week amidst rumours of splits between its members. Most people struggling with inflation and the cost of living probably don’t look for salvation in the depths of the international and business pages. Few organisations cast a longer shadow over economic life in the West than the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) and its tag-alongs in Opec+. Ever since it was first established in 1960, the purpose and mission of this organisation has

Critics of Argentina’s president Javier Milei have already made up their minds: he is a lunatic and his plans will collapse on first contact with the real world. Argentina’s money will run out and the economy will grind to a halt. To some commentators, he is a ‘hard-right’ ideologue who will crash the economy within weeks. They say he’s like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng on roller-skates. If you listen to those attacking Milei, you’d be forgiven for thinking the man in charge in Buenos Aires will precipitate yet another economic calamity in a country which has been stumbling from one disaster to another for almost a hundred years. But

Rachel Reeves is getting used to being nicknamed ‘the copy-and-paste shadow chancellor’ by the Tories. Today she leaned into that name by repeating a phrase she’s been using for a while; one she copied and pasted from another politician. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 question of ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ was the central theme of her Autumn Statement response. Her recast of it was ‘the questions that people will be asking at the next election and after today’s autumn statement are simple: do me and my family feel better off after 13 years of Conservative governments? Do our schools, our hospitals, our police today work