Writing about the stuff that actually hits your wallet. UK Finance, plain English. https://teapawt.org/t.co/WW8HXPqah2. Not advice - just clarity.
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The MJBurrows Briefing.
UK money, translated into English, in one email every weekday at 8am.
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The crypto industry spent $63m (~£47.0m) trying to keep Sherrod Brown out of the Senate, and Ohio looked set to send him back anyway.
Brown was projected to win despite the money ranged against him. Elizabeth Warren is expected to take the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, which has to approve crypto legislation, and whoever holds that gavel largely decides which bills get a hearing.
During talks on the failed Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, Democratic negotiators pushed for tighter controls on illicit finance, limits on officials taking a direct part in the industry, and stronger consumer protections.
Insiders still hope for a crypto tax bill, but lobbyists hold out far less hope for another attempt at a full bill rewriting who regulates the crypto market.
For $63m, the best hope left is the smaller bill.
For what Warren's gavel means for the industry and the tax bill that is left: mjburrows.com/crypto-regulat…
ALT Crypto Regulation Just Lost Its Best Friend in Congress (MJBurrows)
London will be the slowest region to bounce back from the next price fall.
Savills expects the average UK price to drop a further 1.5% in 2027, with a recovery arriving only in the second half of 2028. The blame falls on borrowing costs. Mortgage rates have climbed on the back of the war in Iran, and Emily Williams, Savills' head of residential research, says the conflict has pushed back the prospect of meaningful mortgage rate relief.
Over the five years to 2031, Savills forecasts UK prices rising 15.8%, slightly ahead of income growth of 14.4%. London manages 8.1%, against 23.3% in the North West and 22.2% in the North East.
The gap starts with price. The average London home costs more than 11 times the average salary, against about six times local pay across England's three northern regions.
Dan Hill, a Savills research associate, expects larger family homes to keep supporting demand, while flats face a tougher run.
The capital gets the widest affordability gap in the country and the slowest growth to go with it.
For the full regional table and what Savills says about flats against houses: mjburrows.com/uk-house-price…
ALT UK House Prices Will Not Recover Until Late 2028 (MJBurrows)
Asian markets have marked down AI shares over a rule that nobody has written yet.
Japan's Nikkei 225 fell 3.6% and SoftBank, an investor in OpenAI, lost 8% after Democrats won the House and the Senate. Texas, where voters worry that data centres could trigger blackouts on a power grid already under strain, was one of the upsets.
Stephen Brown, chief North America economist, said federal regulation was the larger danger because it "could delay the speed of AI adoption too". Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, thinks the results could support a further rotation, with investors moving money out of technology and into other corners of the market.
The rule doesn't exist yet, but the invoice has already arrived.
For the data centre fight and what the analysts say tech could be in for: mjburrows.com/ai-crackdown-d…
ALT AI Crackdown Looms as Democrats Take Both Houses (MJBurrows)
Employing a full time minimum wage worker now costs a business at least £4,462 a year more than it did in 2024, and the youngest staff have lost much of their discount.
The Centre for Policy Studies, which argues for free markets, tracked the change from 2024 to 2027. For some workers the increase reached 20%. For an 18 to 20 year old, the extra annual cost is £4,859, after the government set out to equalise pay between young people and other adults. That removes much of the discount that used to make a first hire cheaper than an experienced one.
The British Chambers of Commerce puts the rise in business costs over the past decade at about 70%. The CPS's Daniel Herring says employer costs since 2024 have grown at around twice the pace of inflation.
Andrea Egan, general secretary of Unison, attacked the Chancellor for delaying the moment when youth and adult rates finally meet. The youngest workers still sit on a lower rate.
When youth costs almost the same as experience, a firm will tend to pick experience.
For the full bill on the youngest hires and who is arguing over it: go.mjburrows.com/minimum-wag…
Barclays calls AI the icing on the cake, and the cake is about 5,000 lost jobs.
The bank is cutting about 5,000 roles this year, around 5% of its global workforce, as part of a plan to save more than £1.1bn by 2027. NatWest has already cut 1,400, though around a quarter of those exits followed the sale of Mentor, its consultancy arm. Both bosses insist AI is only part of the story. Barclays boss CS Venkatakrishnan put it this way: "We will employ AI at scale but AI is the icing on the cake not the cake."
The savings are harder to argue with. NatWest delivered £420m of annual savings in the first nine months, and Lloyds has set a second £2bn savings target for 2030. Morgan Stanley now expects 400,000 European banking jobs to go to AI, about 20% of the workforce and twice its earlier estimate.
Shareholders are the first to feel the benefit, and the staff whose roles disappear are the first to pay for it.
For the NatWest and Lloyds numbers behind the cuts, and who ends up paying for them: mjburrows.com/bank-ai-job-cu…
ALT Bank Job Cuts: Barclays 5,000, NatWest 1,400 (MJBurrows)
Anthropic's revenue grew 47% in a quarter, and that counts as a slowdown.
Revenue reached almost $17bn in the three months to September, up from $1.4bn a year earlier. Quarterly growth slowed to 47% from 144%, and price cuts on newer models and discounts to customers took about $600m off third quarter revenue.
The company swung to a $567m operating loss for the quarter, after a $974m profit in the three months before.
Behind the revenue sit roughly $895bn of future spending commitments, nearly all of them for computing. Those commitments are almost seven times its $132bn of cash and short term investments, and $448bn of the commitments is payable by the close of 2030.
The listing, expected on the Nasdaq, could rival SpaceX's record $86.2bn float, the sale of shares to the public for the first time, with talk of a valuation between $1.4 trillion and $1.5 trillion.
Growth has cooled. The bills haven't.
For the spending commitments behind the slowdown and what the price talk asks buyers to take on: mjburrows.com/anthropic-ipo-…
ALT Anthropic IPO Could Rival SpaceX’s $86.2bn Record (MJBurrows)
Rachel Reeves raised £66bn in taxes across two Budgets, and now describes the money as a gift to her successor.
In her first major speech since leaving the Treasury, delivered at Harvard University, she argued that the £24bn buffer she built let John Healey fund cost of living support in his first Budget. Her tax rises landed on businesses, the wealthy and savers.
The most contested part fell on payrolls. Employer national insurance climbed to 15% from 13.8%, and the salary point where bosses begin paying it dropped to £5,000 from £9,100. A shop paying a worker £9,000 a year went from owing nothing on that wage to owing tax on £4,000 of it, or £600 a year. Joblessness reached 5.2% at the end of 2025.
Healey kept a £15bn buffer after his first Budget, £9bn below the level she set.
Some gift. Employers and workers paid for the wrapping, and the next Chancellor who needs room will find less of it.
For the payroll maths behind the gift, and the buffer Healey was left: mjburrows.com/reeves-tax-ris…
ALT Reeves Rewrites Her Tax Rises as a Gift to Healey (MJBurrows)
About half of voters expect Healey's first Budget to make no difference to the economy, and on the evidence they have a point.
A Freshwater Strategy poll found 24% think the Budget will improve things, against 22% who think it will make them worse. With a margin of error of 2.8% either way, optimists and pessimists are close to a tie. The Chancellor raised more than £7bn over three years from bank profits, landlords and savers, and sent £2.6bn of energy support to some 20m households. The public mood is a shrug.
The one clear message is on income tax thresholds, the pay levels where higher tax rates start. A majority, 53%, want them lifted in line with inflation, accepting less money for public services as the cost, while around 38% would leave them frozen. Concern about stealth taxes, such as the levies on property and savings income that arrive through tax returns, outweighed the giveaways.
Frozen thresholds drag more earners into higher rates as pay rises.
Voters asked for thresholds to move, and the Budget answered with roughly £130 per household.
The one thing a majority wanted from the Budget, and the poll behind it: mjburrows.com/healey-budget-…
ALT Voters Are Right to Shrug at the Healey Budget (MJBurrows)
Mercedes' most valuable asset doesn't appear in its accounts, and it's 20 years old.
Kimi Antonelli finished third in Mexico City and still took the Formula 1 title, becoming the youngest champion in the sport's history and Italy's first in over 70 years. Bradley Lord, Mercedes' deputy team principal, says he can do for Italian motor racing what Valentino Rossi did on two wheels, after Rossi won seven world championships in MotoGP and became Italy's global racing ambassador.
The timing suits the business. Mercedes was recently valued at more than $6bn (~£4.5bn) after a minority stake sale, and its latest accounts are expected to show revenues of $1bn (~£745.2m), a rare feat for a sports team. Nike is weighing a return to Formula 1, and Lord says interest in Antonelli is building fastest in Italy.
Lord's instruction to the driver is to go fast and let the rest follow. A champion who stops winning sells far fewer caps, so the sponsors will be hoping the car keeps up.
For what a young champion is worth to Mercedes and its sponsors: mjburrows.com/antonelli-f1-c…
ALT Kimi Antonelli Could Be Italy’s Next Rossi (MJBurrows)
Short sellers have found a corner of the market where the official forecasts are on their side.
The number of London listed companies with more than 5% of their shares sold short has jumped from 27 to 60 over three months. Law firm White & Case found that 14 of them now carry short positions above 10%, up from two, and builders account for five of those. Vistry leads at 16.7%, close to one in six of its shares, with Ibstock at 12.9%.
Short sellers borrow shares, sell them and aim to buy them back cheaper, so each position is a bet the slide has further to run. The Office for Budget Responsibility now expects new housing to drop to 229,000 this year, and the Bank of England is expected to raise rates, its first hike in three years. Dearer mortgages hit the buyers housebuilders depend on.
Retailers are in the sights too, with WH Smith at 11.1% and Ocado at 9.8%.
Boards can no longer see who is betting against them, only how much. It is a bit like being heckled by a crowd with its hoods up.
For the full target list and why the shorts got harder to spot: mjburrows.com/uk-short-selle…
ALT Short Sellers Pile Into Housebuilders as Rates Rise (MJBurrows)
Lenders are cutting into their own profits to win your remortgage, ahead of a Bank of England that is expected to lift Bank Rate to 4%, its first rise in three years.
Remortgages reached 42,600 in September, up from 34,000 a month earlier, as homeowners hurried to lock in a rate. Lloyds says the price war has squeezed its margins to around 75 basis points (hundredths of a percentage point) above wholesale funding. That margin is the gap between what a bank pays to raise money and what it lends it for. At that level, there is not much profit left.
Buying a home is the weak spot. Approvals for house purchase fell to 53,443 in September, close to a three year low, so the big lenders are chasing a smaller pool of buyers. Remortgages are the part still growing, and UK Finance says about 2.3m households reach the end of fixed rate deals in 2027.
Borrowers get the discount. Bank shareholders get the disappointment. The expected rate rise will test how long lenders can afford it.
For what the price war means if your fixed deal is coming to an end: mjburrows.com/mortgage-price…
ALT Remortgages Jump as the Mortgage Price War Heats Up (MJBurrows)