- Public sector net borrowing hit £35.9 billion in August 2020, £30.5 billion more than last month and the third highest borrowing in any month since records began.
- Tax receipts were £37.3 billion in August 2020, £7.5 billion less than last month, with VAT, Corporation Tax and Income Tax receipts falling considerably.
- The government spent £78.5 billion on current expenditure in August 2020, £19.5 billion more than in August 2019.
- Borrowing in the first five months of this financial year (April to August 2020) is estimated to have been £173.7 billion, £146.9 billion more than in the same period last year and the highest borrowing in any April to August period since records began.
- Each of the months from April to August 2020 were also record months for borrowing.
- Government debt has hit £2.02 trillion or around 101.9% of GDP; it has risen 12% in just a year.
- Government debt has tripled since George Osborne warned us that Gordon Brown was bankrupting the country.
To add to the misery, economist Liam Halligan is this morning predicting unemployment will more than double by the end of October…
Following on from yesterday’s good news on testing ramping up now the private sector has been brought in, here is another innovation by the private sector to match buyers and sellers of PPE supplies in a market place. PPEexchange.co.uk was created in 7 days – as a free site to get PPE buyers and sellers in touch with each other and get supplies to the care providers. The software developers did the work for nothing and have the support of both the CBI and GBM union. PPEexchange has been designed, built and developed by and will be supported by PPEx Limited and Shoothill on a pro bono basis. Aimed at the social care sector it is open to users from all sectors as a free resource for their benefit and the good of the wider community.
With time being of the essence now and for the foreseeable future if shortages and bottlenecks can be eliminated, new alternative suppliers sourced and connections made it will in the end save lives. Once again proving that free markets can do what the centralised planners can’t, match supply and demand efficiently, driving down costs and optimising supply chains…
The Prudential Regulation Authority has written to banks and insurers to tell them not to pay out dividends or buy back shares and forget about their bonuses. British banks have complied and even European banks are following suit. The Bank of England thinks the scale of the challenge ahead means they need to keep their cash reserves. Bank shares have fallen hard on the news…
Today is economy day, Shadow Chancellor McDonnell will be up later promising to spend hundreds of billions of borrowed money and raised taxes. Sajid Javid has just promised to increase spending by hundreds of billions in borrowed money. No mention of that fiscal deficit the Tories promised to close in 2015.
All this borrowing will, they both claim, be financed from the sale of government gilts at the currently prevailing cheap interest rates. The market is suspicious and interest rates will inevitably rise if the market is flooded with gilts. The world’s biggest bond investment fund is Pimco, here’s what their chief investment officer for global fixed income told the FT this morning:
“The prospect of increased sales of gilts to fund more government spending makes the current high prices even less attractive. Gilt yields look too low in general. If you don’t need to own them it makes sense to be underweight”
Incidentally, the name of that chief investment officer is Andrew Balls, brother of Ed Balls. Saj knows that investors will not perpetually buy gilts at the high prices and the low yields prevailing today…
In the wilder corners of Twitter, the remainiacs have a meta-conspiracy theory they call “Brexit Disaster Capitalism”, it has a number of components and is based on some far-fetched premises;
- Brexit will be a disaster and lead to economic collapse.
- Prominent rich Brexiteers know this, they intend to profit from it by selling short stocks high to buy back low after the disaster.
- City tycoons and hedge fund managers financed the Brexit campaign to bring about the collapse from which they will profit massively whilst the rest of us suffer.
The fact that Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, has an interest in a fund management firm is cited as proof. The latest incarnation and attempt to shore up the theory is based on the publicly-disclosed short interests of various fund managers who have given money to the Tories, Vote Leave or Boris Johnson’s campaigns. Carole Cadwalladr tweeted last night that they have aggregate short positions of some £4,563,350,000. Four and a half billion quid of shorts by Brexit-backing fund managers sounds like a huge amount. Except it isn’t in relative terms.
The UK stock market is capitalised at over £4 trillion, so that aggregate short position is equivalent to something like a tenth of 1% of the market. Nothing unusual. Long/short funds usually trade stock pairs, so the funds most likely won’t even be that short in net terms because a fund goes short one stock and hedges the position long another stock (hence the term “hedge* fund”). The profit (or loss) is from the difference in the stocks’ relative performances.
More obviously, these funds are overall net long the market, if these rapacious plutocrats were betting on disaster, why would they be positioned to profit massively when the broad stock market went up and lose when it went down? Publicly available data, for example, shows that the prominent Brexiteer donor Paul Marshall’s firm has £1.3 billion in short positions on the UK stock market. His firm manages some £30 billion of assets. Which suggests he is in reality geared to profit far more from rising than falling stock markets.
Incidentally, if the fund managers had been short since referendum night they would have lost their fortunes, given the FTSE is up over a 1000 points since the referendum. The whole “Brexit Disaster Capitalism” conspiracy theory does not make sense even if you accept the premise that Brexit will be a disaster. The hedge fund managers are long the market in the expectation stocks will continue to rise…
*The hedge might also be against derivatives or the relevant market index. To go short without hedge is to be nakedly short. A brave trade.
Threats of a recession in the UK have faded after the UK economy showed solid growth in July. Defying remainer expectations.
As the BBC’s Economics Editor, Faisal Islam, concedes, “strongly suggesting [a] return to growth in Q3, albeit Q3 hasn’t finished yet – so recession not looking likely”.
The 0.5% growth rate – driven greatly by construction growth – comes after a 0.2% contraction in the second quarter of the year, and marks the strongest month of growth since January. 0.3% growth is three times higher than predicted – expect more economic predictions to be defied over the coming months…
