This is another example of “politics is *really* all about my particular bugbears”, which you can tell by the author shoving together two entirely unrelated events linked only by their coincident timing. Falls into the not even wrong category. on.ft.com/4819NPz

Thing I love - when you use a recipe book enough that it falls open on your favourites

There are countries where a public distribution system of goods to the citizenry involves a ration card. The American equivalent is a duration card.

The appropriate market-based risk premium on a 50 year mortgage with an embedded option to lock-in the lowest yield of its life would be absurdly high. To make it affordable, the state subsidy would have to be enormous. These things would be near permanent profit drags.

“Nobody thought a Labour government would have to raise taxes by more than £70bn,” claims one insider in this excellent piece. Shows the problem of the climate of fear in meetings created by some of Starmer’s aides, in that plenty of Labour insiders, did, in fact, think this!

That time of year before we cycle back to “Australian points-based system” talking points with similar depth of understanding

I love the aesthetic of open kitchens, but my clothes do not appreciate the aroma ex post

Ok no more Conor Sen in the feed

It’s a funny version of political credibility where you’re asking the public to support you for saying “well, I never said *that* tax on you wouldn’t go up in the manifesto” rather than, you know, being honest about having underestimated the scale of the challenge.

the synthesis here is you want macro bailed-out while micro churns. productivity gains mostly happen via new entrants or at least new plant. a downturn should be an incredible opportunity for new entrants, as the worst of the old crash and burn! 1/

Coupla thoughts on this one - those two lines do not look like they interact in any meaningful way (flight data need some serious seasonal adjustment) and, secondly, isn't there a government shutdown on that's particularly impacting air traffic control?

Hubristic Argentine president with uncertain US and IMF backing decides to maintain half-arsed crawling band exchange rate regime to hold up peso rather than letting it float despite market pressure. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? www.ft.com/content/b22f...

This is excellent from @robertshrimsley.bsky.social on.ft.com/3LqcP7h

Seems like a thing the government *should* maybe consider stepping in to address - not to bail out the company but to support the pipeline by protecting frontline workers - given how close this is to a key priority

It’s always so touching when a former colleague gets in touch on LinkedIn with a boilerplate marketing message that may as well start “Dear [first name]”

Tax policy on the British left is pure "anti-bedtime left". Bizarre idea that you can have a big social democratic welfare state without everyone contributing properly www.economist.com/britain/2025...

This is true now, was true at the GE, but was true when Hunt announced his desperate NI cuts at his last two budgets - both times which Labour rightly criticised but refused to row back on when in govt. An idiotic self-imposed bind which has severely hampered their first 18 months in govt.

Salami splicing: jamming it all together to make a tax sausage

If it’s right (and I don’t know anymore than anyone else here), it’s an obituary for the political project anyway so I guess…sure? It’s not really about the fiscal headroom. It’s that the manifesto red lines are themselves causing the market to doubt the capacity of the government to tax if required

Sometimes I think I’ve come up with the mad take and yet they always outdo me… bsky.app/profile/toma...

In addition to everything Dylan says in this thread, it’s just a bit tragic for *a government four years from an election* to be saying “they hate him more than us“. That just shouldn’t be your focus four years out!

Suddenly had flashbacks from Red Plenty & it occurs to me that one reading I haven’t seen is that capitalists have a lot more at stake from success of AI (to the extent it’s capable to resolving centralised coordination problems) than socialists, who have a model for when competitive moats collapse.

All those gerrymandering bills depend on people with safe seats donating some of their margin of safety to help neighbouring districts. I think that some of them might be a little bit more reluctant to make that gamble today than they were yesterday.

UK brick deliveries are a useful proxy for new house building starts in the absence of monthly house building starts data & the latest data from the Department for Business & Trade (DBT) covers September 2025. (1/n) #ukhousing #ukconstruction

This time it’s set in the Universal Studio vaults and some intern knocks over a cabinet dropping a DVD of an old franchise at the foot of a bored executive

I did some fairly detailed research on this. My house is average, insulation-wise. The cost of cutting emissions via a heat pump was a lot lower than insulation. Makes sense for government to prioritise heat pump support.

You’d think it would be a major scandal at least in certain circles that the CEO of America’s most valuable defense contractor gets absolutely blasted on heroic amounts of cocaine before going on TV and screaming about his stock being down 5%

TIRED: Pitching reverse mortgages WIRED: Pitching crypto treasury vehicles

Hadn't really checked in on the CPI Property Group hybrids in a couple of years and...boy, that must have been a hell of a ride

What you do not want here - from a credit market perspective - is increasing liquidity preference at a time when new supply rattling secondaries (temptation to flip into new bonds) with managers starting to get concerned about year end numbers (yes, I know it shouldn't be a thing but it be a thing!)

Useful lesson for government and commentariat here: It’s not really a fiscal crisis if a couple of pence on the basic rate can fix it

Families won’t receive even partial SNAP benefits for at least a few more days. Support your local food banks NOW. I’m raising money for the @fooddepository.bsky.social here: www.classy.org/fundraiser/6... Please donate!

US IG has been better behaved than I expected given the huge amount of supply hitting the long end of the curve. Still, excess returns there are likely to be pressured given ~10 bps breakevens.

One thing I would add to this excellent thread from Tomas is that the Govt/state should choose some projects that need fixing and show public that it fixed them. The small state people only get any purchase outside of their bubble because people are weary of all the money the state wasted

35bps on the 10-year in a month is not trivial - and notable that the fiscal crisis talk has been meaningfully quietened

10yr Gilt yield now close to year-to-date lows (it touched 4.38% earlier). Much more important than the 30yr in determining overall funding costs (outstanding stock has a weighted-average maturity of ~14 years).

Not 100% on this yet, but possible the repricing here will push the long-end through its 12M spread breakeven - IGLB out 10 bps so far

FYI, I've fleshed out some recent comments on Tesco bashing into a blog... 🤔✍️ julianhjessop.substack.com/p/its-time-t...

Meta, Alphabet (Google) et al issuing long-dated IG debt is IMO mostly a financing cost hedge for significant capex buildout - long-term projects need long-term committed financing & they can issue super cheap across the curve right now. But it *does* signal they are shifting to a capex heavy model

This is going to go so wrong so quickly in such obvious ways for everyone involved - and they’re all so excited to get to that end point

Get away from polling brain for a second and see the argument for what it is - either govt can show the state working to deliver better social & economic outcomes, or there are those in the wings willing to make that choice a binary one. That is the challenge being placed in front of this government

The problem lots of people have when thinking about tax (and I suffer from this often) is that we think about (existing) stock rather than (dynamic) flow. That is, we tend to think more about how changes impact people today rather than how they shift incentives in future.

To the extent private credit "masks" tight conditions, it presumably implied continuing to provide credit into the private sector when public markets are impaired/unwilling. Not (I think) what he thinks he's saying here.

Ah the long dash

In Oregon, California and Illinois, state law enforcement agencies are meticulously documenting criminal misconduct by Trump's secret police for use in litigation and to support eventual prosecution of the malefactors.

RIP to another real one www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

40 million users on halloween [takes a long drag on a cigarette] no way one of them isn’t a dracula

Actually there is a "financial repression"-esque answer for why risk premia in treasuries might not show up as higher corporate spreads - if government was funding a large corporate subsidy w/ debt issuance you could (in theory) improve the creditworthiness of corporates at the cost of the sovereign