Who leaked this Number 10 discussion to Jeffrey Epstein? And are there consequences for the leaker? It’s an internal discussion re. getting markets moving in the aftermath of the financial crisis. No doubt of great interest to Epstein and his financial market clients.

Absolutely mad.

Ayer, Liam, de cinco años, y su papá Adrian fueron liberados del centro de detención de Dilley. Los recogí anoche y los acompañé de regreso a Minnesota esta mañana. Liam ya está en casa. Con su gorra y su mochila.

Someone who really wanted to throw a cat among the pigeons would start asking whether it is right for people who go to university, but don't do laboratory subjects, to bear the cost of others who do so.

Humane and sensible step move by Spain in facilitating irregular migrants and asylum seekers to move to work with decent pay, social security and tax payments. Predictably the right is grumbling - unlike the UK, the govt isn’t allowing this to set their policies www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Left: Labour's Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, "Illegal migration is ‘tearing our country apart’" Right: PM of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, "Yes, my country has offered a path to regulate half a million undocumented migrants" "This is the path we choose. Dignity, community and justice"

The BBC need to do better than letting panelists simply lie about what they said bsky.app/profile/impl...

“You can be much more ambitious” in driving global M&A given a vibe shift in antitrust approaches both sides of the pond, says James Webber, partner at A&O Shearman - in conversation with me in this week’s Dealcast. Listen now! podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/d...

This should be career-ending stuff. The part where she talks about wanting those not 100% aligned with her to walk away is positively unhinged.

Best choice of words?

One of so many reasons I could not cut it in politics: I would not be able to bring myself to go “sorry, you needed…how many years notice to know when you needed to retire?”

In 21st century US politics, the two most important ongoing stories are: 1) The radicalization of the GOP, & 2) the degradation of the information environment, ie, the death of accountability journalism. Neither gets a fraction of the attention devoted to, say, annoying woke undergrads.

NEW: A Texas county medical examiner found that Geraldo Lunas Campos was choked to death by a guard while he was held in ICE custody earlier this month. Geraldo is the sixth person to die in ICE detention this year.

Starmer needs to ditch McSweeney and craft a narrative for his government that appeals to Labour’s actual potential coalition - liberal, educated, urban, Remain-coded - as opposed to chasing working class voters with Diet Reform stylings.

Welcome to Romford, now in Zone 15, where the buses have been halved in frequency (and end at 8pm) and no-one gets a Freedom Pass.

If Rayner channels Carney with an IPPR paper/speech on Britain’s geostrategic nudity - in, say…March? - that’s how we’ll know she’s thinking seriously and is being well advised by someone.

Starmer needs to ditch McSweeney and craft a narrative for his government that appeals to Labour’s actual potential coalition - liberal, educated, urban, Remain-coded - as opposed to chasing working class voters with Diet Reform stylings.

The idea that having a “narrative” means having a legitimate position on the matter is taking root in our media with distressing rapidity. bsky.app/profile/bens...

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com/BillMelugin_...

The BBC coverage is absolutely terrible. It leads on "sharply contested narratives" It has a dramatic skew to the US government It has posted the video but has failed to report on what it shows: it shows the US govt account is untrue

1/ Others have pointed this out, but there are massive hidden costs in terms of effort and contingency planning to all the Trump threats that never materialize because he never meant them, TACO'd, got talked out of it, or got distracted. I wanted to talk about why by explaining risk mitigation.

🧵 Global economic prospects, corporate agility, risk pricing conundrums, sticky inflation, the AI bubble and the death of liberal democracy. Happy weekend when you get there.

🧵 Global economic prospects, corporate agility, risk pricing conundrums, sticky inflation, the AI bubble and the death of liberal democracy. Happy weekend when you get there.

Typically excellent from El-Erian. He highlights corporate resilience and contingency planning in stock selection - this is a key driver of strong M&A deal flow in 2H25 and into 2026. Boards are eager to build optionality via scale.

One bonus, heretical thought: if you’re interested in a topic, a long essay can be more informative than a (non-fiction) book. There is a silly publishing convention that a "serious" book needs to be 300 pages++. The result is tomes that are mostly filler. Might the 5,000-word New Yorker be better?

And it creates scar tissue - I suspect in US consumer confidence (the weakness of which has confused some market watchers); and also in the slow decoupling of nations still interested in like-minded multilateralism (see Carney speech, non-nativist EU member states, etc.)

The TACO cycle: Markets want to price in TACO. But TACO only works if Trump sees stocks tank. So we get a loop: Trump does things → nothing happens (markets already priced in TACO) → that emboldens him to do more → until markets start to think he might not TACO → stocks fall → TACO is restored.

Lab to DK is a group twice as large as Lab to Ref (and losses to DK are often easiest to win back) Lab to Grn/LD is a group three times as large as Lab to Ref (and on multiple metrics this group looks more open to returning to Labour)

Meanwhile, the VIX is at 20.

Yes, it's true, the demand curve intersects the supply curve

One of the awful aspects of Brexit (that the British ignore) is that it weakened the EU. A rational reorganisation would be to reincorporate the British, and throw Hungary out. /1

The Carney speech is v good. More generally, I think it’s important that the UK & EU recognise that this is a new world. And waiting for the mid-terms or 2028 and things to get back to ‘normal’ isn’t good enough. Need to build the capacity & resilience to be less reliant on the US for security.

A speech of rare consequence, with profound implications for middling countries including the UK.

Can Keir Starmer plausibly argue otherwise? And what does that mean for our relationship with the EU? It’s obvious to all but those who are chasing cross-tabs on the hunt for hero voters.

This is an absolutely astonishing intervention from Carney. He’s saying what many are thinking but it’s still striking to hear it from a serving G7 PM. Do listen to the whole excerpt.

Dismissing the UK getting serious about re-aligning with the European single market as "foolish" and "utopian" is going to help confidence in the UK economy, investment and growth just how? giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

A thousand times this. If we want to take defence spending from circa 2.5% of GDP to circa 3.5-4% of GDP the question isn’t “how do we pay for it?”. That’s the easy bit - a combination of taxes and borrowing. The real question is about real resources and what do we want to do less of?

EU readies €93bn tariffs in retaliation for Trump’s Greenland threat ft.trib.al/5Qfqifp

Lol, lmao etc etc...

Amazed they didn’t go with “webuyanyCon.com”

1. Ukraine wouldn’t collapse. The US is already providing less and guess what: You lower your contribution, you lessen your leverage. 2. No state compromises on its territorial integrity. Not Ukraine, not the Kingdom of Denmark. 3. Good luck explaining all this to the US public in an election year

New figures show more people chose London’s West End this past festive season. It’s a powerful reminder of the West End’s pull and the vital role it plays in our economy and city life as we move forward with our proposals to transform Oxford Street. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

once again this just reads like a horror story

What is the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) that European lawmakers want to activate in response to Trump's 10% tariff announcement? Adopted in 2023, the instrument was designed to hit back at foreign acts of economic coercion. It was inspired by China's trade restrictions on Lithuania. 🧵

Looks like the EU-US trade deal is now dead, with all three major groups in the EU Parliament calling at least for suspension. The downward spiral has already begun.

How it started ... How it's going

Worth noting that the EU’s reluctant tariff concessions to the US, agreed between VdL and Trump at Turnberry, haven’t yet been approved by the European Parliament. There’s no realistic prospect of the US deal going through now.

[1/6] A reminder: Europe has cards to use against the US. Lots of them. To cite some examples: - Tighten screws on US digital giants (taxes, fines, even bans) - Export taxes disrupting US supply chains eg pharma - Exclude US firms from European procurement, inc defence ecfr.eu/publication/...

Just how unhinged does Trump have to become before Congress or his Cabinet intervene to stop him? If he wants to impose more taxes on US consumers by raising tariffs, Europe (incl the UK) can't stop him, but it definitely can't compromise on principles of territorial integrity & self determination.

France should be glad they failed.