Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author of ‘Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis’ and ‘The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031’
Airbus will abandon the UK. The car factories will all be closed down. Trade will grind to a halt, we will run out of food and medicines, and Harry Kane will be sold to Real Madrid and made captain of Spain instead of England. Okay, I made that last one up, but all the others
Everyone thinks they know the script of how Italy’s saga will play out. As the populists take power in Rome, they will rail against Brussels, try to fight austerity, come up with some bold plans for reforming the euro, and hold a referendum or two. And then they will meekly cave in as Angela Merkel
Everyone thinks they know the script of how Italy’s saga will play out. As the populists take power in Rome, they will rail against Brussels, try to fight austerity, come up with some bold plans for reforming the euro, and hold a referendum or two. And then they will meekly cave in as Angela Merkel
Bond yields are soaring. Stock markets are tanking. The banks are looking wobbly, and money is starting to drain out of Italy. To listen to the mainstream commentary on the Italian crisis part 782, you’d imagine that a wild and irresponsible ‘populist’ government had just been tamed by the financial markets. And that once some
Whole industries will be devastated. There will be thirty mile queues of lorries stretching back from Dover. The price of food will rocket, our farmers will be wiped out, and the IRA will be letting off bombs all over the UK as the Troubles return to Northern Ireland. With every day that passes, the scare
The stock market is reeling. The White House has already witnessed the resignation of the President’s most senior economic adviser. The EU is preparing retaliation, and other countries are checking the rule books to see what sort of tariffs and quotas they might be allowed to impose. In the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to
The Dow drops by eleven hundred points, its largest one-day fall ever. Equities around the world crash in sympathy. The bond markets are rattled, picture editors start looking for their stock photos of traders gazing despairingly at their Bloomberg terminals, and anxious-looking analysts turn up on TV warning that a recession might be just around
Unemployment would soar. Trade would collapse. Factories would close, and house prices would be in freefall. Rewind to the spring and summer of 2016, when Project Fear was at its peak, and we were meant to be shivering in the streets by now, flicking through battered copies of ‘The Road’ for tips on surviving in
The headlines just about write themselves. A hard-left Labour shadow chancellor flies off to Davos to preach revolution and socialism to the world’s most elite gathering of business leaders. Surely that is a sign that Jeremy’s Corbyn’s Labour party is being taken seriously by the big wheels of global business. And a sign as well
There are plenty of questions to be asked about the decision by Rupert Murdoch to sell 21st-Century Fox, including Sky in this country, to Disney. On what, for example, will Momentum blame the loss of the 2022 election if not the malign influence of the Australian tycoon? Is the old rattlesnake finally bowing out of
A top rate of 50 percent? A wider range of tax bands? Lower allowances? Or some combination of all three? When it unveils its Budget on Thursday, the Scottish National Party is just about certain to use its power to increase income taxes. The only real debate is about who will take the hit. On
There have been plenty of reasons to feel optimistic about the British economy over the past year. Employment levels have hit record levels, and are among some of the highest in the world. Leaving the EU doesn’t seem to have dented growth much, and there is still plenty of investment pouring into the country. The
A high speed rail line from Manchester to Glasgow. Three of the shiny new Elizabeth lines crossing London. Thirty or forty hospitals, almost sixty Manchester City squads, and perhaps a dozen Bitcoins (although it might be only eleven by the time you are reading this). There is still a lot you can get for 40
We could have given them free Spotify subscriptions. Or Just Eat vouchers. Instead, the government’s pitch to Jezza-loving twenty-somethings was a cut in stamp duty for first-time buyers. The levy on buying a home will be abolished completely up to £300,000, and, for the trainee bankers and tech moguls buying in the better parts of
Maybe we should blame John Grisham. In his breakthrough best-seller The Firm, the young lawyer Mitch, played by Tom Cruise in the movie, has to make regular trips to the Cayman Islands where the corrupt law firm he works for creates hundreds of shell companies for the assorted cast of money launderers, tax dodgers and
Windfall taxes imposed overnight. A sweeping programme of nationalisation. A levy on every bank transaction. A campaign on ‘back taxes’ that amounted to little more than hustling money out of corporations. The first couple of years of a government run by Jeremy Corbyn might not be quite as extreme as the all-out assault on private
The wine bars will be spookily empty. The lap-dancing clubs will be abandoned, and Savills will have to start working out how to sell mansions within an hour’s commute of Frankfurt and Paris instead of London. Just about every day brings another dire prediction about the impact of leaving the EU on the City’s mighty
The exit bill keeps going higher and higher. No progress has been made on the Irish border, and not much on citizens’ rights. The talks are deadlocked, and you need an extraordinary level of optimism to imagine that Theresa May talking directly to Emmanuel Macron or Angela Merkel is gong to make much difference to
We have a couple of hundred years of economic history to tell us that some things are just a really, really bad idea. Printing loads of money, for example. State control of industries. Punitive taxes. Subsidies. But of all the really terrible polices a government can put in place, the very worst of all is
There are some commercial decisions that are intrinsically difficult to defend. The plot of the last Captain America film, for example. Ryanair’s charges for bags that are slightly too big. The price of the new iPhone, and just about anything done by the lovable folks over at Foxtons. Credit cards changes come very close to
