So interest rates are staying up here, and, as importantly for us, our investments and the rest of the world’s economies, in the US as well. Accentuating the positive, they haven’t gone up and consensus is that they have peaked and may well start to come down at some point this year. In an election year governments. Must, I’m sure, rue the day that they gave away control of interest-rate-setting to their central banks (the Bank of England and the Fed), as bringing them down would be an easy feel-good bribe, and blow the long-term effects. On that note, J Hunt seems to be saying that tax cuts are ‘unlikely’. He’s apparently ‘managing expectations’, which, given how much we actually need to be spending on so many things which don’t involve bombing and shooting people, is a good thing. I’d say.
“CBI forecasts no Bank of England rate cuts until at least 2026”
The ‘lag’, ‘trailing leg’ or ‘long wake’ of any economic measure means that its effects are often felt long after the problem it was supposed to solve has disappeared. 2010’s ‘balancing the books within the space of one parliament’ (that went well, didn’t it?), austerity to you and me, is one example.