Money news

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Is it really harder for young people to buy a home than it was 30 years ago?

The Resolution Foundation has called for 25-year-olds to be paid £10,000 to help them afford homes, saying the ‘generational contract’ between young and old has broken down. But is it really harder for young people to buy a home now than it was 30 years ago? House prices were booming in the first half of 1988, when a typical first-time buyer home could cost £50,000. That same property now, according to the Halifax UK House Price Index, would cost £234,850. Since 1988, the Retail Prices Index has increased 2.7 times, according to the ONS, so, in real terms, £50,000 in 1988 is now worth £135,000 – making it harder to afford

Joanna Williams

Giving millennials £10,000 won’t tackle the generation gap

David Willetts, one time minister of state for universities and science turned chief spokesperson for baby boomer self-flagellation, is clearly troubled by the year of his birth. Since his 2010 book, The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future and why they should give it back, he’s been desperately seeking atonement for the privileges that happy date accrued. Now, thanks to a report from the Resolution Foundation, we know the precise cost of easing Willetts’s conscience: £10,000 – to be made payable to every 25 year old. A cheque for £10,000 landing on the doormat will no doubt make hitting the quarter of a century milestone a little

Tuesday

Steerpike

Gaffe of the week: Sainsbury’s CEO’s ode to money

We’ve all been there – you’re lined up to go live on air to explain to the public why it’s in the public interest for your supermarket company to merge with a supermarket rival and suddenly you find yourself singing… ‘we’re in the money’. Or at least, this is what happened to the CEO of Sainsbury’s Mike Coupe ahead of an interview with ITV News: Watch Sainsbury's CEO sing "we're in the money" while waiting to talk about the £12 billion merger with Asda – he's since apologised for his "unguarded moment" https://t.co/Kuaowz0q1u pic.twitter.com/jYMngcahS2 — ITV News (@itvnews) April 30, 2018 While Coupe has since apologised for ‘the unfortunate choice of

Saturday

Colin Freeman

Ransom money has turned Boko Haram into Nigeria’s Cosa Nostra

Amina Ahmed counts herself as one of the lucky ones, or just about. When Boko Haram staged a mass kidnapping in her home town of Gwoza, northern Nigeria, three years ago, she and other female captives were sorted into two different categories of chattel. The less favoured ones were conscripted as cannon fodder against the Nigerian army, with suicide bombs strapped to their waists. The others became ‘servants to the Emir’s soldiers’ – which, Amina discovered, was Islamist-speak for sex slave. During her two years in captivity, she was forced to sleep with at least 10 different men. She’d shudder whenever she heard their motorbikes roaring into camp. Eight months

James Forsyth James Forsyth

London shows what happens to the Tories when homeowners become a minority

Next Saturday had long been circled in Tory plotters’ diaries as the date on which the next effort to remove Theresa May would begin. But as I say in The Sun this morning, even May’s most ardent Tory critics now accept that next week’s local elections aren’t going to lead to her downfall. Why, because expectations are so low for the Tories that they are almost bound to surpass them. (May’s own position is also stronger than it was in January thanks to her handling of the Salisbury attack.) Tory insiders now believe that they are likely to hold one of their London flagship councils, Westminster and Wandsworth. This combined

Friday

Ross Clark

Brexit isn’t to blame for dismal GDP growth – and nor is the weather

The government’s opponents were not slow, as usual, to blame today’s disappointing data on economic growth on Brexit (the IOD) or ‘austerity’ (John McDonnell) – while the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, chose to fall back on that old chestnut used by corporate spokesmen when announcing dismal results: the weather. None of these will really do as an explanation as to why GDP growth, according to the ONS, plunged from a healthy 0.4 per cent in the final quarter of last year to a miserable 0.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2018. As for Brexit, GDP figures have been shrugging it off for nearly two years – the economy even

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Finland’s Universal Basic Income experiment falls flat

Should governments abolish their welfare states and replace them with a Universal Basic Income (UBI), paid to everyone, even billionaires, regardless of means? Such payments would be designed to cover essential living costs, leaving individuals free to make the choice of whether they wished to work in order to gain themselves a better lifestyle. It is an idea which until yesterday seemed to be in the ascendant. Bernie Sanders has advocated it. John McDonnell has launched a study to determine whether it should become Labour policy. It hasn’t just attracted the Left – Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have declared themselves in favour, seeing a UBI as a means of

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The Brexit bounce making a mockery of George Osborne’s Project Fear

We are now just two months away from the second anniversary of the Brexit vote and therefore in a position to judge the apocalyptic forecast made by the Treasury in May 2016 in the run-up to the vote. In a paper signed off by George Osborne, which neither the former chancellor nor anyone else who has made a grim prognosis for Britain’s departure from the EU should be allowed to forget, the finest minds in the Treasury came up with two scenarios for the aftermath of a vote to leave the EU. In the ‘shock’ scenario, GDP would be 3.6 per cent lower after two years (compared with if the country

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Tories’ biggest problem at the next election? Generation Rent

The government is currently busying itself trying to win retrospective Commons votes on Theresa May’s Syria intervention and clearing up the Home Office’s Windrush mess. But should they have time for some morning reading, today’s Resolution Foundation research on millenials’ property prospects ought to give cause for alarm. The think tank predicts that one in three millennials will never own their own home. Instead, they will have to live – and potentially raise families – in privately rented accommodation throughout their lives. And that’s before we get to what happens when they stop working and rely on a pension. What’s more, half of current UK 20-35-year-olds are expected to be renting

Monday

Steerpike

Revealed: the truth about the latest NHS funding poll

Last week there was an exclusive in the Times – widely followed up – revealing majority support for NHS-linked tax rises. ‘For the first time in more than a decade, a majority of Britons say that they are personally willing to pay more to increase spending, according to the respected British Social Attitudes survey’. It followed this up by a leading article to this breakthrough, saying: ‘Ministerial hearts may be gladdened, therefore, by a new poll published in The Times today. It suggests that 61 per cent voters back higher taxes to fund the health service, with 25 per cent saying that the government should raise existing taxes and 36

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Gender pay gap hysteria could make things worse for women

Next time I hear a government minister on radio or television bemoaning Britain’s poor record on productivity I request that the interviewer puts to them a simple question: can you tell us how many man-hours have been spent by large British firms in fulfilling their legal duty to provide data on their gender pay gap – something which they must do by midnight tonight? Whatever happened to that grand talk about taking advantage of Brexit in order to deregulate, to attract investment by giving businesses the freedom to run their own affairs and by getting the government off their backs? In January last year Philip Hammond made a speech in

Tuesday

Steerpike

Watch: Gender pay gap row – Stella Creasy vs Kate Andrews

Oh dear. On Bank Holiday Monday, Stella Creasy took to the airwaves to promote the #PayMeToo campaign launched to close the gender pay gap. The campaign claims to give working women advice on how to tackle the gender pay where they work. Alas, the Labour MP appeared to be taken by surprise to find the Institute of Economic Affair’s Kate Andrew not only take issue with the campaign – and its close name association to the #MeToo campaign on sexual harassment – but also with Creasy’s use of data. Mr S will leave readers to decide who won this tussle…

Monday

Ross Clark

Are you a winner or a loser from Trump’s trade war?

China’s imposition today of tariffs on 128 imports from the US was inevitable – and is no doubt exactly the reaction that Donald Trump wants, giving him the excuse to announce yet more tariffs in addition to those on steel and aluminium imports which he has already imposed.  After all he did say, even before China announced any form of retaliation:  “trade wars are good.  It should easy for the US to win one”.  A trade war is what he wanted, and what he has got. But does he have any more of a strategy for his trade war than George W Bush had a plan for winning the peace in

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

A trade war with China sounds terrifying – but the US is doing the right thing

Nobody likes the sound of trade war, and rightly so. China’s new retaliatory tariffs moves against US products feel like the beginning of something bad: an escalating tit-for-tat trade conflict between the world’s richest countries which could choke the global economy. But there are good reasons to think that, far from being another silly move by a hothead president, Trump’s right about trade with China and that, as he has with North Korea, he is grasping a dangerous nettle that other presidents dared not touch. It may be scary, but it needs to be done. And it’s not just necessary for America, but perhaps the rest of the world as

Monday

Ross Clark

The EU’s petulance is turning its Galileo satellite into a white elephant

Moves by the EU to try to stop British armed forces from accessing the Galileo satellite system, and to prevent British companies from bidding for work on it, are, as one senior UK official told the FT, ‘outrageous’. Britain has contributed 12 per cent of the costs. The EU’s argument that to allow British involvement would be a security risk are perverse, given that China, Israel, Ukraine and Morocco are participating in the project. Does anyone really think that relations between post-Brexit Britain and EU will sink so low that European governments will consider us more of a security risk than China? Galileo isn’t principally a military system at all. It is

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Nicolas Sarkozy held on Gaddafi funding claims

Nicolas Sarkozy was put in custody this morning as part of a police investigation into allegations that he received millions of euros in illegal financing during his 2007 presidential campaign from the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. According to Le Monde, Sarkozy – who has denied wrongdoing since the investigation was launched in 2013 – is being held at the Nanterre police station, west of Paris. He could be detained for up to 48 hours as he answers questions about the funding for his 2007 presidential campaign, in which he defeated the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal. The alleged payments would contravene the maximum funding limit of 21m euros and also breach

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Don’t pinch the penny!

It always takes a few hours for the nasties in a Budget to become clear. That is as true with today’s seemingly content-less Spring Statement. In the small print is a proposal to do away with one pence and two pence coins. Of course, inflation eats away at the value of coins so as to make the smaller ones pretty value-less over time – an argument made by the Treasury. The country survived the abolition of the farthing in 1971 and the halfpenny in 1984. A halfpenny in the mid-1980s, indeed, was worth more in real terms than a penny now. Yet the Spring Statement documents also propose to do

James Kirkup James Kirkup

May is finally embracing Osborne’s agenda

Here are the two words that matter most in today’s Spring Statement: “balanced approach”. Those words appear five times in the official text of Phillip Hammond’s speech, and I suspect we’ll hear them again through the course of this year and beyond. Here they are in context: “We will continue to deliver a balanced approach. Balancing debt reduction against the need for investment in Britain’s future. Support to hard-working families through lower taxes. And our commitment to our public services.” In terms of macroeconomics, this is a possible signal that in the Budget in the autumn, Hammond will finally yield to arguments that have been made in No 10 and elsewhere

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Good, bad and ugly: Philip Hammond’s Spring Statement in nine graphs

Philip Hammond declared himself to be an optimist in his Spring Statement today – and he had a few boasts to prove it: manufacturing enjoying the continued longest growth in 50 years, three million more jobs, borrowing down. He was laying into Labour, in a way he wishes he’d been allowed to during the general election campaign. But the news was in the accompanying financial forecasts: here’s what jumped out at me. 1. The Tories have given up trying to balance the books. Hammond didn’t make an announcement to this effect, but he laid out plans for deficits for years to come. George Osborne at least pretended to be, say,

Thursday

Joanna Williams

Tackling the gender pay gap could leave us all worse off

It’s International Women’s Day. As feminists rush to detail the many disadvantages still facing women (yes, all women, everywhere) we’ll no doubt hear a great deal about the gender pay gap. In that regard, International Women’s Day is a bit like every other day of the year. But let’s go with it. According to the Office for National Statistics, the gap between the median hourly earnings of men and women working full time is 9.1 per cent. The Fawcett Society prefers the mean figure of 14.1 per cent. Actually, they’d like us to focus on the gap between the total average earnings of men compared to women – about 18.4