PM Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have terrified the nation the ahead of the Autumn Budget, by threatening a raft of tax hikes on Wednesday. Taxpayers aren’t the only ones getting anxious.
The nation got a taste of what Labour has in store when Reeves axed the Winter Fuel Payment for 10million pensioners within days of the election.
Now Labour is after anybody with a bit of wealth to their name, even if it’s only enough to write the occasional cheque, to use Starmer’s unhinged definition.
Labour is going after our capital gains, our inheritances, and worst of all, our pensions.
At the same time, Reeves is going to rewrite the fiscal rules, to allow herself to borrow up to £57billion to invest in infrastructure.
The UK government already borrows £120billion a year, to plug the gap between taxation and spending. Reeves wants to borrow even more.
Now a key warning signal is started to flash as a result.
Last Thursday, I warned that Reeves is about to take a massive gamble with the nation’s finances. If she gets it wrong, we face another Liz Truss moment.
The bond market is on red alert, because it doesn’t like people who play silly buggers with the nation’s finances, as Liz Truss did in her disastrous mini-Budget in September 2022.
Truss threw a barrel load of tax cuts at the wealthiest Britons in the hope of driving growth, without funding them by making cutbacks else.
It was a reckless gamble and it backfired.
Global bond investors didn’t trust us any longer, and wouldn’t lend the money we desperately need to balance the books.
UK borrowing costs surged as we had to pay bond investors more interest to lure them into buying our gilts.
That sent mortgage rates rocketing past 6%, and almost destroyed the nation’s pensions. Now we’re potentially looking at a repeat.
After the Truss mini-Budget fiasco, yields on 10-year UK government bonds, known as gilts, shot past 4%. That was the highest rate since the 2008 financial crisis.
And today?
In the middle of September, before Reeves unveiled her £57billion bombshell, yields on 10-year gilts stood at 3.77%. Suddenly, they’ve shot up to 4.262%.
That’s just a whisker away from the 4.388% they hit on 10 September, shortly before the Bank of England stepped in to save the UK’s financial system from Calamity Liz.
There’s not a huge amount of difference between 4.262% and 4.388%, if you ask me. Reeves is treading a thin line.
Business confidence is plunging, as companies brace themselves for a £20billion tax hit, with Reeves set to make them pay national insurance on employee pension contributions.
If sentiment slips further bond yields will rise higher and frankly, they don’t have to rise far before we’re back into nightmare Liz Truss territory.
It’s a terrifying prospect, and it could be just a couple of days away. Hold tight.
