Almost a year after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget sparked a meltdown in the bond market, the Bank of England is preparing to test investors yet again. This Thursday will see a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting at which rate setters will debate whether to raise interest rates to 5.5pc. Inflation data the day before is expected to show an acceleration in price rises in August and will fuel debate. Yet the meeting may also see the MPC agree to ramp up the pace of bond sales as it speeds up...

Andrew Bailey and his colleagues at the Bank of England all agree that inflation must be crushed. Unfortunately, they don’t agree on the best way to do it: policymakers are split on whether to hold interest rates at their current level of 5.25pc or raise it higher at next week’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting. The latest jobs market figures will not help, with data on pay and on employment pointing in different directions. Pushing Bailey and his colleagues towards another increase in...

Policymakers around the world have become addicted to cheap money, the Bank of England’s chief economist has warned. Ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing from central banks have enabled heavy borrowing from policymakers, Huw Pill told a conference in South Africa. But now interest rates have surged, governments and economies face a “process of normalisation” that “is going to be a very challenging process”, Mr Pill said. In July alone, interest on the national debt in the UK...

Sir Keir Starmer is under pressure from union bosses to launch a tax raid on wealthy Britons’ assets in the event of a Labour victory at the next election. The Trade Unions Congress (TUC) said it was “time to start a national conversation about taxing wealth” as the Labour leader prepares to set out his stall for the upcoming general election campaign ahead of party conference season. Around a quarter of Labour’s donations come from unions, with the party receiving £5.1m in 2022, a sum which...

Britain’s housing crisis is fuelling the nation’s wealth gap with the US, forcing families to spend more money on smaller homes, the Social Market Foundation has warned. Households in the UK typically earn less than Americans but spend around one-fifth more as a share of their incomes on housing. Those expensive homes are, on average, 60pc smaller than those in the United States. Given that Americans’ very high productivity levels mean they are already around one-third richer than Britons,...