Matthew Lynn

Tax rises would bring debts under control. The Bank of England would bring inflation back down again. The government would steadily win back the confidence of the financial markets, repair relations with the EU, remove some of the obstacles to growth and, once all that was in place, try and cut a minor tax or

The waiters can sometimes be a little surly. That holiday villa you booked in the Loire may not always be as desirable as it looked in the pictures. And you can never be entirely sure which side they will be on in a major war. Still, despite occasional inconsistencies, there is one thing you could

There are plenty of reasons for viewing today’s huge merger deal between the UK mobile networks of Vodafone and Three with suspicion. It could reduce choice for consumers. It may lead to job losses. And it is possible that they will downgrade their service even more than they already have, cut back on investment, and

Sometimes it helps to have a banker as Prime Minister. They have plenty of faults. They can be dry, calculating, and they are typically far too rich to connect with ordinary people. But if they have one thing going for them it is this: they can spot free money when they see it. And Rishi

We might have thought Trussonomics was dead and buried for a generation after its author’s short-lived premiership last autumn. But all of a sudden it has a high-profile, if slightly unexpected, convert: Sir Keir Starmer. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Starmer was sounding a lot like Kwasi Kwarteng last

Hollywood will be backing him en masse. The major newspapers will be rooting to put him back in the White House. And most of corporate America, in between filling in the forms for the next round of ‘green subsidies’, will be quietly hoping for another four years of lavish spending and protectionism to keep out

It was, admittedly, not quite as thrilling as an action sequence from Call of Duty. Even so, the statement put out by Bobby Kotick, chief executive of US video game publisher Activision, following the UK’s bizarre decision to block the company’s acquisition by Microsoft was about as bloodthirsty as any ever put out by a

The chip maker ARM decided against listing its shares in London, despite plenty of arm twisting from the government. The building materials group CRH decided last month that New York was a better place for its equity to be traded, leaving the FTSE for good. The mining giant BHP has moved its listing from London

It could be next month. It might be next week. Or it might well happen over the weekend. But today’s collapse in the share price of Deutsche Bank, and the huge rise in the cost of insuring its debt against default, means it is probably only a matter of time before there’s an intervention. It

It would have been bad enough if just one major British company had decided to list its shares in New York rather than London in the space of a single week. But two? First it was the chip-maker Arm, one of the UK’s very few major technology companies. Then came the building materials giant CRH.

Our growth rate has been miserable. We have not invested enough. And over thirteen years the Conservatives have cut spending too much, damaged our trading relationships with our major neighbours, and made a mess of the tax system. These were Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s major criticism of Tory economics today in a speech in which

One of the major exchanges has gone spectacularly bust. Billions of investor’s money has been lost. There have been allegations of widespread fraud, and one of the biggest corporate trials in modern history is set to dominate the business pages over the rest of the year. The collapse of the FTX, and the arrest of

We are not leading the world in deregulation, or in creating new ‘green industries’. We certainly don’t lead in tax-cutting, or innovation, or technology. Still, there is one respect in which the British economy can claim to be ahead of everyone else. Rising prices. When the world is caught up in an inflationary spiral, the