Economy

Who knows what Rachel Reeves reads in bed. Perhaps she dips into her own debut book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics (2023), and dreams of those carefree pre-government days when serious people, Mark Carney for one, thought she might make a decent Chancellor. But if she’s also burning midnight oil over drafts of her Autumn Statement, I hope her boxes are packed with granular data on the state of the UK job market. September normally sees a recruitment surge, but not this year. A summary of recent stats in IFA Magazine shows vacancies down by 119,000 from a year ago and entry-level graduate jobs down by as much as

Gold goes on up: having risen by an unprecedented 40 per cent in a year to pass $3,600 (or £2,675) per ounce by the beginning of this week, even its most ardent devotees are wondering how long the surge can last. Much of the rise clearly represents a stampede towards the most traditional of safe havens, in anticipation of market storms ahead as well as fears over inflation and Donald Trump’s threat to the independence of the US Federal Reserve. But it also has to do with a secular shift in the economic world: de-dollarisation, as favoured by the busload of US-hating heads of states who partied with Xi Jinping

I must modestly doubt that the Supreme Court justices took account of my 12 July column in their ruling on the issue of hidden car finance commissions. But the effect, limiting compensation claims to the more egregious cases of overcharging, is to do exactly what I hoped: namely to head off ‘a tsunami of claims that could cripple lenders and provoke a mini banking crisis’. Chancellor Rachel Reeves evidently hoped so too; given that up to 90 per cent of new UK car sales are financed by loans offered through car dealerships, a collapse of that market would have put another ding in an already battered economy. The total claims

At Stansted on Monday, a currency kiosk offered me €270 for £300. ‘Wrong way round,’ I said, having swiftly figured €300 for £270 would represent an exchange rate of 1.11, close enough to the current market level of 1.14. ‘Nah, mate, airport rate, innit?’ This week’s first lesson is never buy euros at the airport; but the second lesson is that wherever you buy them – especially if you have, say, a Mediterranean superyacht charter in prospect – you’re in for a painfully expensive summer. Back in March you could have had €1.20 for your pound. Since then sentiment towards sterling has been soured by expectations of bad economic news

The weekend’s torrential Yorkshire rain amid a hosepipe ban offered a handy metaphor for the chaos that has befallen the privatised UK water industry. Sir Jon Cunliffe’s Independent Water Commission report – aiming for a ‘fundamental reset’ to restore public confidence, clean our waterways and ensure future supply – is welcome for the clarity of its central conclusion: that unfit-for-purpose Ofwat and a jumble of other regulators should be replaced by a single body with more teeth and comprehensive oversight of the sector. So far, so good. Cunliffe – a veteran of the Treasury, the Bank of England and Brussels – can also be applauded for his bureaucratic cunning in

In February 2020, a few weeks before Britain was thrown into lockdown, Sajid Javid resigned as chancellor of the exchequer over a bust-up with the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. The fight was thought to be over Cummings’s attempts to dictate who could and could not work in No. 11. In fact, it was just one skirmish in a long-running and bitter power struggle between the two men. Two months before his resignation, Javid had claimed victory in a different battle against Cummings – one over who would occupy the governor’s office at the Bank of England. Cummings wanted Andy Haldane, then the Bank’s chief economist, who he believed

Well, would you look at Mark Carney. Just three months ago I described the incoming prime minister of Canada and former governor of the Bank of England as ‘a fish-out-of-water technocrat’ who made little public impact over here and was swiftly forgotten after he left in 2020. When I once came across him hunched and dark-suited in the Pret queue at King’s Cross, midway through his Bank tenure, I actually felt sorry for him. But here he is, beer-swigging in an Ottawa bar with Sir Keir Starmer; cutting Donald Trump short in a press call before the G7 meeting; shedding his eco-credentials to champion Canadian oil and gas; and generally

The Chancellor’s promise of £14 billion for the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk is hardly news. The project has been talked about for 15 years while the existing UK nuclear estate has gradually been shut down and the only other new station, Hinkley Point in Somerset, has stumbled to a decade-long delay and £28 billion of budget overruns. Quite some optimism – verging on Milibandian delusion – is required to embrace the idea that Sizewell will come quicker and cheaper because it will replicate Hinkley Point while avoiding its mistakes. And since Chinese money has been ruled out, it’s still a mystery as to who else will pay