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🚨 The Defence Secretary told households to stock three days of food and water because a cyber attack could knock out supermarket tills or the supply chain
The Be Ready list is three litres of bottled water per person per day for drinking plus more for cooking and washing, tinned food, cash, an FM radio, blankets and a first-aid kit
It came out the day after a PHP flaw took 32 government services offline as a precaution and saw millions of exploit attempts
Britain has no national food reserve, the last one was wound down in the 1990s and about half the food we eat is imported
Streeting said be alert but not alarmed which of course he would say because he doesn’t want people panicking yet the practical effect is the same one already hitting fuel and food prices, the state is telling people to cover themselves because the reserves that used to sit behind the country are gone
Are you stocking anything extra or do you think it’s unnecessary? Drop a comment either way
🚨 It took ten years for UK debt to go from £1tn to £2tn
It has taken six years to go from £2tn to £3tn
That works out at roughly £100,000 per household and last month the interest alone cost £10.9bn the highest for any September on record and £2bn more than expected
£4bn of that one-month bill was just the automatic extra amount added to inflation-linked bonds after prices rose so when inflation goes up the interest the government has to pay goes up with it and that money is already coming out of tax
Borrowing so far this year is still £6bn over what was forecast and the extra is mainly from higher interest costs and benefits not from less tax coming in
The £3tn number is the headline the speed it has risen and the interest already being paid from tax is what hits people now a week before the Budget
🚨 Fuel prices just pushed inflation up to 3.5%, the highest in nearly a year, and on the same day the government approved a new North Sea gas field and started a fund that takes the tax from that gas and spends it on green projects that won’t help bills for years
Petrol is now 169.5p a litre and diesel is 192.5p. Fuel prices are up almost 30% on last year
The Energy Secretary said the new gas from Jackdaw will not make energy bills cheaper this winter. It will be sold at the same high world price as the gas we already use
The companies will still pay a very high tax on the profits from that gas
The government is taking that tax money and putting it into a new Energy Wealth Fund, starting with £2 billion, instead of using it to help with bills right now
So people are already paying the higher fuel prices that pushed inflation up today. The companies sell the gas at the high price. The government takes a big tax cut from the profits
And that money goes into a fund for later green projects, not toward the bills people are facing this winter
🚨 44% of Americans had trouble paying for at least one basic necessity in the past year
Pew’s survey shows a lot of people are already falling behind on the basics, whether that’s medical care, getting around, keeping a roof over their head or even putting food on the table
While a quarter still can’t clear all their monthly bills, over half have no three-month buffer and most say their income still falls short of the life they want
Investopedia has the lifetime cost of the American Dream at $5.32 million this year, up 4%, with homeownership alone at $1.28 million and a median college graduate on track for about $4.1 million including Social Security, still a million short
September inflation came in at 3.7% with gas up 34% on the year so the higher costs are already showing up in the bills people are trying to pay
Most people are still aiming for the same things their parents managed, a place of their own, kids and a retirement that doesn’t panic them…
Yet the total now sits beyond what most of them will ever be able to earn
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🚨 France is trying to cut €43 billion from the deficit. The weekend’s riots just made that more expensive
The 10-year yield rose and the gap over German bonds widened to 1.46%, the highest in two weeks. The CAC 40 fell over 1%
Around 1,500 to 2,000 shops were looted or damaged. Carrefour said dozens of its stores were hit. The damage is already in the hundreds of millions
Macron pointed to high fuel prices and cost-of-living anger. Investors marked French debt wider because the government could not keep order
Higher yields make the welfare state more expensive to fund. Shopkeepers are paying the immediate bill. Taxpayers pay the longer one through higher borrowing costs
Nothing that happened over the weekend points toward lower French bond yields. It points the other way
🚨Hedge funds have been dumping AI stocks at the second fastest pace in a year
Meanwhile regular investors put $3.2 bn into SOXL in two days. It's a fund that moves 3x whatever chip stocks do that day, so if chips fall 10% it falls about 30%
$3.2 bn is around 16% of the whole fund. In two days
And this is after chips fell seven days straight and Korea's market dropped almost 8% in one day
Goldman tracks how bullish hedge funds are on AI and it's gone from 4.34 to 3.27, one of the lowest readings in the past year
So the people who do this for a living are pulling money out, and everyone else is piling in with 3x funds that can lose money even if chips go sideways, because they reset every day
The mainstream view is it's just money moving around the market and it'll settle down. Could be...
But we all know who usually ends up holding it if it doesn't
🚨 UK GDP looked better than expected in August, but the reason is not what it looks like
The rise came from production, manufacturing went up 1.2% and pharmaceuticals jumped 5.1%, that one small part of manufacturing did more than half the gain by itself
Services stayed flat and construction fell again, pharmaceutical numbers jump around a lot from month to month because of when batches are made, exports go out and stock levels change, it does not mean people are buying more
A random jump in one small and volatile part of manufacturing stopped the headline from going negative
That is not the same as the economy looking strong two weeks before the Budget
Do not get fooled by the official story, the number is real but the reason behind it is not real strength
🚨 The IMF just warned the global economy is starting to pull apart
Countries don’t have as much spare money or spare energy stocks as they used to, and inflation is still high in a lot of places
Higher energy costs from the Middle East are dragging growth down, while the AI boom is lifting it in the countries that supply the chips, data centres and power
Energy exporters that aren’t caught in the war are also doing fine, their revenues are up and they can absorb higher prices more easily
Poorer countries that have to import their fuel and sit outside the AI supply chain are the ones running short of room, their import bills have risen and they have less spare cash to shield people when prices jump
The IMF said governments should sort their finances out now while they still can, and help people instead of trying to hold prices down
We all know that’s not going to happen
🚨 Governments are already paying high interest because energy and inflation are up
Now big AI companies are borrowing a lot of money too. That money comes from the same place that used to buy government bonds
Less money available means governments have to pay more to borrow
Hedge funds also own more of these bonds than they used to, and a lot of it is borrowed money. If they all try to sell at the same time, the interest rate can jump fast
The IMF warned this week that the bond market is more open to exactly that kind of sudden rise
When the rate jumps, new mortgages get more expensive and a lot of other investments fall in value
You end up paying either way
🚨 They spent two years complaining about a £22bn black hole left by the last government. Now its £35bn…
Then they raised taxes by around £50bn. The biggest tax-raising parliament on record
Now the IFS says there’s still a £35bn gap by 2030 just to stop public services being cut in real terms and hit the defence target
Taxes went up. The hole got bigger
That’s the pattern. Governments talk about the black hole, raise taxes, then keep spending more anyway
Inflation eats the budgets, new priorities get added, and the gap reappears only larger
The IFS still expects the borrowing rules to be met with about £20bn left over. This isn’t about breaking the rules. It’s about spending plans that keep growing faster than the tax rises can cover
The hole grew after the taxes. How many more times does this have to happen before the pattern is obvious?
🚨 This is how tangled the AI money already is. One private company changes how it counts its sales, and about $170 billion comes off Nvidia in a day
OpenAI told investors the annualised revenue at the end of September was $50 billion. The $68 billion figure going round included its partners’ sales. Same business. About $18 billion of it was never OpenAI’s
Nvidia fell 2.9%. Oracle fell 5.5%. AMD fell 3.9%. CoreWeave fell 7.8%. The Nasdaq closed down 1.25%
Those firms are not rivals sitting next to it. They are the ones who have already signed the chip and cloud contracts, and they are spending against a buyer that publishes no accounts
If you hold a global fund or a pension that tracks the US market, you already own the suppliers. You do not own the company that moved the number
This is what happened just this week
🔴 US 10-year auction: 5.300%, up from 4.834% at the last sale. Highest since November 2000
🔴 UK 30-year gilt: touched 6.02%. First time since 1998
🔴 UK five-year fixed mortgage: average hit 6%. Highest since late 2023. Bank Rate still 3.75%
🔴 Japan 30-year: sold this morning at 4.121%
The higher oil price has already turned up in what governments pay to borrow, and in what a fixed mortgage now costs
None of these were failed sales. The US still placed $39 billion of 10-year notes, and foreign buyers took 80.3% of them
Britain and Japan sold the long end too. Buyers showed up. They just demanded a higher coupon to do it
That coupon is now in the mortgage. The Bank of England is still at 3.75%. At the start of September there were 1,494 fixed deals under 5%
By 5 October there were nine….

