Commentary on current events through an Austrian lens — by James Elliott, author of Rails to Freedom.
On 27 August 2026 HM Revenue and Customs published something it had never published before: official Capital Gains Tax statistics that isolate cryptoasset gains. Two hundred and…
On 25 August 2026 Eurostat reported that the European Union recorded a goods trade deficit of €21.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Extra-EU imports of €701.8 billion…
The ONS article itself confirms this. It notes that adopting an expanded methodology "would continue to bring our estimates of UK digital infrastructure investment closer to ext…
On 13 August 2026 Tether announced that KPMG U.S. had finished a full independent audit of Tether International, S.A. de C.V.'s financial statements for the year ended 31 Decemb…
On 20 August 2026 Eurostat published first estimates of production in construction for June 2026. Seasonally adjusted output fell 1.3 per cent on the month in the euro area and …
On 13 August 2026 the European Union's End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2026/1738 — entered into force. The Commission's news page of 12 August presented it…
On 12 August 2026 the UK's Competition and Markets Authority published its provisional decision in the strategic review of 33 market remedies — remedies that cover 60 per cent…
On 11 August 2026 the Bank of Russia published draft guidance — open for consultation until 24 August — limiting non-qualified retail investors to bitcoin, ether, and Tether…
On 12 August 2026 the European Union's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2025/40, the PPWR — reaches its general application date. Eighteen months a…
On 9 August 2026 the Department for Transport announced nearly £130 million for zero-emission vehicle technology — public money matched by industry, with an additional £17 m…
On 8 August 2026 the European Commission's DG-FISMA extended the deadline for its targeted consultation on the review of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) from 31 A…
On 7 August 2026 the European Commission and the SpaceRISE consortium signed the implementation agreement for IRIS² — the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and…
On 6 August 2026 the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport published a public statement: the Culture Secretary had decided not to issue a Public Interest Intervention Notic…
On 5 August 2026 the UK Trade Remedies Authority initiated its first new safeguard investigation since the body was established after EU exit. The product is polyethylene tereph…
On 2 August 2026 the transparency provisions of the EU AI Act — Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 50, in its first phase-in window — became directly applicable across all t…
On 3 August 2026 the European Central Bank highlighted two new focus boxes in Economic Bulletin Issue 5/2026 that map how the Middle East war's energy shock lands on euro area h…
On Friday 31 July 2026 the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published its June-July 2026 Newsletter, formally recording the end of the Markets in Crypto-Assets (…
On Thursday 31 July 2026 the European Central Bank published the results of its 2026 thematic reverse stress test on geopolitical risk, covering 110 euro-area banks under direct…
On 30 July 2026 the European Commission opened a call for tenders — titled "EU launches AI Gigafactories call to boost Europe's computing capacity and unlock more than €30 b…
On 29 July 2026 the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9–3 to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 3-1/2 to 3-3/4 percent. Voting against the action were B…
On 28 July 2026 the European Commission launched a call for proposals under the Battery Booster Facility, making up to €1.5 billion in interest-free loans available to support…
On 23 July 2026 Eurostat confirmed, in its Renewable Energy Statistics article, that provisional 2025 data show renewables reached 26.2% of EU gross final energy consumption, up…
On 24 July 2026 the European Commission approved a €54 million Luxembourgish State aid scheme to support road transport and rail freight companies facing increased fuel prices…
On his third day in Downing Street, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced a 20% business rates cut for pubs, social clubs and live music venues in England, effective from April …
On 20 July 2026, Bloomberg reported that the European Commission had circulated internal guidelines suspending for three years the penalties under Regulation (EU) 2024/1787 — …
On his second day in Downing Street, the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced the removal of the 5% VAT rate from domestic electricity bills, effective 1 October 2026, redu…
On 17 July 2026 the European Commission presented a revised EU Emissions Trading System alongside an Electrification Action Plan. The headline expansions are significant: the ET…
BitMine Immersion Technologies disclosed on its 13 July 2026 weekly update that it now holds 5,770,038 ETH — roughly 4.8% of Ethereum's circulating supply — of which 4.92 mi…
On 15 July 2026 Japan's House of Councillors passed and enacted amendments to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and the Payment Services Act, reclassifying crypto asset…
In mid-July 2026 the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee put another official number on systemic risk. The July Financial Stability Report, framed by the FPC Record of …
At 9:45am on 14 July 2026, Andrew Bailey stood before the Treasury Select Committee and delivered the Bank of England's latest judgment on the health of the UK financial system.…
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, an organisation calling itself the Ethereum Institutional Initiative launched as an independent nonprofit with a deliberately unfashionable mission: convince fiv…
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 —…
From 1 July 2026, British manufacturers who need foreign steel face a new mathematical challenge. The UK government has slashed the volume of steel that can be imported tariff-f…
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…
On 1 July 2026, Robinhood — a brokerage with roughly $32 billion in market capitalisation — launched Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-powered Ethereum Layer-2. The next day, Uni…
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…
The European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation entered full enforcement today. Of the 1,200 firms that once held national virtual-asset service provider registration…
The European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation reached full enforcement today. Of the more than 1,200 firms that previously operated under national virtual asset ser…
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…