\u201cThe Chancellor more than doubled her fiscal headroom from around \u00a310 billion to just under \u00a322 billion,\u201d Deutsche Bank analyst Sanjay Raja said in a note to clients.<\/p>\n
Such considerations should reduce the U.K.\u2019s vulnerability to swings in global financial markets, which has been exposed more than once in a year when U.S. President Donald Trump has upended the global trading order. Investors had worried all year that a global economic slowdown could push Britain in the direction of a debt crisis.<\/p>\n
But Reeves now estimates the budget deficit will fall to 1.9 percent of GDP by 2030, from 4.5 percent of GDP in the current year. That will stabilize the debt ratio well below 100 percent of GDP, but at a cost. By freezing income tax thresholds for the rest of this parliament, and by a host of smaller measures, Reeves will raise the overall tax take to a record 38 percent of gross domestic product, according to the OBR. <\/p>\n
The new debt trajectory generated a measure of relief in bond markets, visible in a drop of 0.05 percentage points in the government\u2019s key 10-year borrowing cost to 4.44 percent by 2 p.m. in London. That was the lowest since the leak of Reeves abandoning her planned increase in income tax rates two weeks ago.<\/p>\n
It also fed through into slightly stronger expectations of interest rate cuts from the Bank of England. The two-year gilt yield, which closely tracks expectations of the Bank Rate, fell 0.03 percentage points to a 15-month low of 3.74 percent. <\/p>\n
Reeves was careful to avoid the mistakes of her last budget which, by raising regulated prices sharply, drove headline inflation back to 4 percent over the summer. In her statement on Tuesday, she went in the other direction, freezing rail and bus fares and removing some of the government-directed charges on energy bills. The OBR said these measures would take 0.4 percent off the rate of inflation over the next year. <\/p>\n
\u201cI have cut the cost of living with money off bills and prices frozen,\u201d Reeves said. Deutsche\u2019s Raja said the measures would have a \u201cmodest but meaningful\u201d impact on inflation, making the Bank\u2019s job \u201cslightly easier\u201d for the next 12 months. <\/p>\n
The Bank of England held off from cutting the key Bank Rate at its latest Monetary Policy Committee meeting this month, despite increasingly signs of the job market weakening. Most analysts had said at the time they would expect a cut in December, as long as the budget didn\u2019t add to inflationary pressures. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Chancellor more than doubled her fiscal headroom from around \u00a310 billion to just under \u00a322 billion,\u201d Deutsche…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[331,3420,748,1194,487,6659,2825,32,35,393,4884,476,478,2441,17436,1144,5111,712,1200,16,15,49,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-595249","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-banks","10":"tag-bonds","11":"tag-britain","12":"tag-budget","13":"tag-cost-of-living","14":"tag-crisis","15":"tag-debt","16":"tag-donald-trump","17":"tag-energy","18":"tag-england","19":"tag-great-britain","20":"tag-inflation","21":"tag-interest-rates","22":"tag-markets","23":"tag-monetary-policy","24":"tag-northern-ireland","25":"tag-parliament","26":"tag-scotland","27":"tag-tax","28":"tag-uk","29":"tag-united-kingdom","30":"tag-united-states","31":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115616687589172808","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}