The trigger for her problems had been a debut “fiscal event” from a confident newly installed chancellor, eager to kickstart a new era for the British economy.
The risk is that changing the fiscal rules worries the markets and results in real world consequences for voters in the form of higher interest rates and more expensive mortgages. Similar warnings are coming from the financial world. Nigel Green, chief executive of deVere group, a global financial advisory firm, said last week: “If Reeves doesn’t tread carefully, we could see a repeat, albeit to a lesser degree, of the panic that followed Truss’s mini-Budget.”
“The one period when UK interest rates jumped markedly higher than America’s was during that Liz Truss period,” he said on his podcast with Osborne.“That was the Liz Truss market wobble. In the last few months, we’ve started for the first time again to see UK long term interest rates go higher than America’s, since the middle of the year, since the general election… we’ve had a bigger rise in the markets demanding a high interest rate in Britain than the other big G7 economies this year.
Truss had already shown a disregard of economic orthodoxy: she sacked the Treasury’s most senior civil servant, Tom Scholar, and refused to commission a “scorecard” on her tax and spending plans from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which would have shown the likely effect on the public finances over the medium term.
It was only after the Bank of England stepped in that the situation began to calm, helped by Truss’s promise to reverse some of the measures – but she was still forced out of office within weeks, having lost the support of Conservative MPs. He suggested the Chancellor was aware of the dangers, given her promise to impose “guardrails” on borrowing, and added: “If she’s got guard rails within her fiscal rules that tells you that there’s a bit of concern, and that concern is undoubtedly firmly reflected in the financial markets.”: “There is a wait-and-see approach from a lot of investors at the moment, they want to see what gets announced specifically.
Many economists expect the Chancellor to go further in order to raise money which will be spent on infrastructure projects such as green energy, transport links and hospital buildings. Barret Kupelian of PwC said: “We expect less orthodox approaches to be adopted, which are likely to involve amending fiscal rules – recognising the fact that short-term net debt rules put a chokehold on long-term investments.
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