Daily commentary on current events through an Austrian lens — by James Elliott, author of Rails to Freedom, and other community-minded authors.
On 10 July 2026, HM Treasury and HMRC published their "Tax update 2026: simplification, modernisation and fairness" — a package of eleven consultations and announcements. The …
The Office for Budget Responsibility reported that UK government borrowing reached £24.3 billion in April 2026. That figure stood £3.4 billion above the monthly profile the OB…
The Bank of England has confirmed, on its own website, that its next Monetary Policy Report will be published at noon on 30 July 2026. That sentence sounds like a scheduling not…
On 8 July 2026, Ofgem announced it will administer the UK government's Bill Discount Scheme. The programme will pay recurring compensation to communities that host new electrici…
On 17 June 2026 the Office for National Statistics published its monthly Consumer Price Inflation bulletin for the May 2026 reference period, and the headline was a study in sta…
On 8 July 2026 Reuters published internal Indian government documents that amount to a quiet confession of state failure. The Reserve Bank of India has reasserted that cryptocur…
On 8 July 2026 the Office for Budget Responsibility published its Forecast Evaluation Report for June 2026, doing something unusual for an official institution: it compared its …
On 6 July 2026, the European Central Bank released Occasional Papers No. 392 and No. 393, the fifth and final instalment of a research effort called the ESCB ChaMP (Challenges f…
On 29 June 2026, BlackRock — the world's largest asset manager, overseeing roughly $10 trillion in client assets and operating a risk-management platform called Aladdin that m…
On 2 July 2026, Catherine L. Mann — an external member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee since September 2021, and before that the chief economist at Citi —…
On 1 July 2026, Robinhood — a regulated US broker-dealer with roughly $90 billion in market capitalisation and twelve years of SEC and FINRA oversight — launched its new fin…
HM Treasury published the GDP deflators at market prices and the money GDP series for the June 2026 Quarterly National Accounts on 30 June 2026. The release gives the OBR's spri…
Tomorrow, 1 July 2026, the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation enters full force. The grandfathering period that allowed 1,200 crypto-asset service providers to…
Ofgem has set the Q2 2026 energy price cap. From 1 April to 30 June 2026, the typical dual-fuel Direct Debit household pays £117 less than the year before — a 7% cut — brin…
The story is one of a central bank staying the course. Inflation in the euro area is above target, the labour market is tight, wage settlements are running hot, the Middle East …
On 18 June 2026 the Office for National Statistics published its labour-market bulletin for February to April. The UK employment rate — the share of people aged 16 to 64 in pa…
On 23 June 2026 HM Revenue & Customs published the rules for what is, in effect, a re-allocation of the British saver. From 6 April 2027, anyone under 65 will only be able to pu…
On 26 June 2026 the European Central Bank published the May 2026 wave of its Consumer Expectations Survey. Across roughly 19,000 respondents in eleven euro-area countries, the m…
On 23 June 2026 the OBR published its tenth Welfare Trends Report. The number that hit the front pages was eight point five per cent. That is the share of Universal Credit spend…
On Thursday 25 June 2026, by a vote of seven to one, New York's Rent Guidelines Board froze the rent on roughly one million rent-stabilised apartments for two years. The board h…
On Friday 26 June 2026, UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced a refugee sponsorship route modelled on Canada's Private Sponsorship of Refugees Programme. Universities, com…