October 17, 2025 • 15 mins
On this week's markets wrap, hosts Merryn Somerset Webb and John Stepek unpack a series of headlines that seem to confirm their long-standing warnings — from fiscal cracks and risky lending to energy costs and gold’s sudden rise. They connect the dots between market anxiety, political inaction, and the “outbreaks of reality” shaping the UK economy.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-15/uk-s-top-energy-suppliers-warn-bills-will-surge-on-grid-upgrades
Check out that video: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/b8c78c69-0d5b-46eb-8692-68ce2c5cf274
Listen back: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/why-new-rules-are-needed-to-avoid-war-in-space-pippa-malmgren/id1654809850?i=1000638621310
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Welcome to the Maren
Talks Money Market Wrap while we talk about the biggest
moves in markets this week and what is driving them.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I'm Marren Zumset, Web editor at Large for Bloomberg. You
Go Wealth.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I'm joined Stare Weic, senior report at the Bloomberg and
al sort of them need distilled news.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
Later, said John, I'm reading the papers this morning, and
I'm thinking about all the podcasts we've done over the
last couple of years and how quite often we're going
against mainstream views and talking about the stuff that maybe
other people aren't mad for, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
But looking at the newspapers this morning, it feels to
me like everything is kind of going our way. Are
the things that we expected to happen or happening, and
other people are beginning to agree with us on things.
So look, just let me read you a couple of
the headlines that I'm filling out this morning.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Right, cann't just see this Soon's warden.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I know I'm worried too, and I don't know where
we go next. Off everyone starts agreeing with us. Okay,
go ahead, here we go, attack on undersea cables could
cause civil collapse. Defense grandees have told the Prime Minister
he's running out of time to protect Breaken from catastrophic attack, etc. See,
you know we had that. We talked about that year
and a half ago with Pepper Malgram. Go back and
(01:18):
listening to that, everybody, these big Cold War topics and
the things that Tea talked about, the war in space,
the war under the sea, the wars that you cannot see,
and how interesting they are in handful of Mayle for
our future. Imf urges us to deal with huge deficits
sooner rather than later. As global jet two GDP rises
hit one hundred percent. Now, we have been talking about
(01:38):
that over and over and over. We'll come back to gold.
But gold is the answer to those problems.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
But here's another one that I really like.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Startup extracts lysium in Durham, the sum startup I know,
hoping to extract battery metal from Brian's beneath Northeast England.
Says it aims to produce twenty thousand tons a year
within a decade. Now. We have talked endlessly on this
podcast about the pyer men of need right about how
we focus too much on things at the top, self vacuation,
gender wars, culture bluff, and not enough down the bottom.
(02:07):
Have we got enough of the fundamentals that make us
society work? And we've talked a lot in particular about
all these metals and how we were really serious about
things like energy transition, et cetera, et cetera, would simply
dig up bodmin more. Everyone laughs. And now what is
not exactly bodmin more. But it's outside Durham. These things
are actually happening. And here's another one that we might
come back to. Financiers sound alarm on standards after collapse
(02:30):
exposes riskier lending, riskier lending a private credit who could
have got.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Never never, and also also the fact that the money
behind it is mostly common from banks.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, fascinating.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Well, there's the systemic angle.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
So this brings us back, John.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Every single headline I've just read brings us back to gold. Yes,
the anti anti crisis investment, the anti AI investment, the
anti collapse of private credit investment, the anti everything.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
How that's mat right, Yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I think. Well, one thing I found interesting is the
correlations that we usually see with gold have largely broken down,
and so people are sort of flailing around for reasons
to explain why it's going up. And I just kind
of wrote a piece yesterday looking at the previous times
that gold has that gold has become a bubble, So
(03:24):
the end of the nineteen seventies and two thousand, between
two thousand and eight and twenty eleven, it's pretty clear
those were both times where everyone was basically freaked out
about what looked like a pending collapse in the established
world order. Like you know, the nineteen seventies, people often
talk about the kind of British stay essentially being on
(03:47):
the Vergie collapse, and some people have been talking about
possibly kind of civil war. And then after two thousand
and eight, obviously the financial system actually did collapse and
was then put back together with kind of string and cellotape,
which led to the problems that we have now. So
I think that that's actually the best explanation overall for
why gold is going up, and that at some point
(04:09):
either this stuff will get fixed, at which point gold
will go down and you'll probably wish you'd sold it
at the top. But at the moment, it's still very
hard to see what's on the horizon that could start
that process of things getting fixed or reaching a more
stable equilibrium. Again.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Yeah, it feels like we need to see more of
a crisis before the political will takes this kind of
thing as seriously as we think they should. Or maybe
they're taking it as seriously it should behind the scenes,
just not in public.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
I mean, I always trying to think about this this morning,
and I mean taking it back to the UK. I mean,
one of the points I think we've made here often
is that the UK's fiscal situation is bad, but it's
not desperate in relative terms. And the real problem at
the moment is there's no sense that there's a pathway
(05:03):
out of it that the government is willing to take.
And by the government, I don't just mean this government,
I mean the governments have not been I want to
take if someone actually looks as if they're going to
grasp that nettle, and if that person can then also
get it past their own you know, backbenchers and the voters,
(05:24):
and that I could see that that being a kind
of turning point, or if it was even I mean,
if it was happening in the US. I don't see
it happening in the US. Right away. But there's no
pressure really on the US to deal with this. But
certainly yeah, in the UK, if if you've got a
sense that there was a pathway forward that was going
to actually work, then yeah, you know, maybe we could
(05:47):
start to turn around.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, but the grasping of that netle, I mean, we're
going to have to get onto the budget in November.
In this conversation, the grasping of the nettle involved not
just increasing taxes on the rich whoever whoever they are.
It involves cutting spending. And also, if you have to
increase taxes, increasing taxes across the board, it has to
(06:10):
involve putting out the basic rate of tax. Nothing else
can work. Right, But what we're seeing at the moment,
or the mood music coming out of the Treasury is
not really about cutting spending and fiddle here or there.
But that's not really what this conversation is about. It's
more about the nonsense of those with broad shoulders, who,
as we often say, are using their broad shoulders at
the moment to carry their suitcases to Milan, or to
(06:31):
encourage someone else to carry their suitcases to Milan. So
you know, we know this is all coming and we
can see it going back to one of our favorite
topics in the housing market, which is pretty much certainly
at the top end, completely static.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I mean that's the statistics on in London specifically that
came out in the last kind of week or so
just really staggered on. There was a lane in this
report base I think is Molia. See in the basically,
even if the land was free, is not economic to
build in London just now because they will cost inflation,
(07:09):
but also because there's no demand, because the demand has
basically mostly been filled by investors because you need a
lot of money to afford a property in London. So
and even things like you know, cutting back or in
the amount affordable housing or fiddling with they can have
(07:29):
unnecessary new safety regulations that have been panic rushed down.
Isn't can they do ithing about that?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, this is the line from the report. Development costs
are high, so it is unviable to build profitably in
half of London areas under six hundred and fifty squab foot.
This is even if the land is provided free and
there are no planning obligations.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Yeah, that's bond Culls.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
And I did speak to did speak to a planning lawyer.
Relatively recently, he said that just nothing, nothing thing happening
in central London, nothing at all early that.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
It's one of these things where you don't really know
what to say to that, because clearly the property itself
is unaffordable. But if you then you know, like no
one can afford to buy realistically, But then if no
one can afford to build more, then you're a very
very strange kind of point. It doesn't seem economically rational.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
No, so two things have to happen.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
It needs to be made significantly cheaper to build houses,
which means a bonfire of the regulations again as ever,
land needs to become less expensive one way or another.
But crucially, i'm one of the things that would be
super helpful in the UK would be a rising as
significant rise in real wages.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Yeah, and I mean unfortunately real wages are starting to
tunt flat again because wages are kind of slowly coming down,
And even then the composition is very very very skewed
and me and my own inflation's going back. Hopefully inflation
should edge loorld towards the end of the year, as
(09:05):
long as you don't get any more nasty surprises, which
obviously is you know not.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
The one can Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Yeah, history of nasty surprises is not great.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Well with that in mind, John, actually I wanted to
point to the other outbreak of the recognition of reality
in the UK, and that is that if everyone should
go and look at this video, and in fact we'll
put a link in the show notes to the UK's
big energy bosses talking to Parliamentary.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Oh are you you've wet my schedule?
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I was actually I was thinking this would be one
of your headlines.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
It was, but I meant to state at the beginning,
but you know, I had so many headlines.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I was live, live, live, the best for last.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
But this is a genuine outbreak of reality. Right. So
you've got you've got the big bosses at the big
energy companies in the UK and they are talking to
the Parliamentary Energy Committee and talking about what they call
the non commodity cost of energy. Now, anyone who's long
time listening to this podcast will not be surprised by
any of these things.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Please do go back.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
And listen to some of the podcasts that we have
recently done on energy prices in the UK and how
they work. But the key point here is here is there,
Rachel Fletcher's director of Regulation and Octopus Energy. If we
continue on the path we are on, in all likelihood
electricity prices are going to be twenty percent higher, even
if wholesale prices half.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Now the other.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Representatives from suppliers MEDIFICCCTER who were that agreed with this
because because it's just true that it is not the
wholesale price of energy that is driving up electricity prices
in the UK. And this has now been said very
clearly by industry executives. So the idea that the government
constantly puts out that high electricity prices in the UK
(10:48):
are d a direct result of changes in gas prices
is now being shown very definitively to be not the case,
or certainly not the case according to energy bosses in
the UK. So this is I think a really Christine shift.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Yeah, it's someone's set the part that has been oddly
quiet up until now out loud. I'm guessing it's because
you know, at the end of the day, they're going
to be the ones who are getting pummeled by politicians
when it turns out that they can't meet promises that
politicians made up on their behalf and it has been
made up. I mean, this idea about the three hundred
(11:23):
pound reduction in household bills, I mean, and that has
never been tenable. And it's quite a striking example a
you know, people kind of talk about how Rachel Reeves
can't break the manifesto, pledge and income tax, et cetera.
And then you know, they're allowed to just blatantly make
something up like that, which I find and really not.
(11:45):
I have not been partisan here.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
This is just.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Misinformation and blatant, and I suspect it will continue to
be repeated regardless of this, and I suspect we'll get
lots of people in the comments for this particular podcast
shifting the goalposts about you know, oh yeah, but if
we invested X in the grid, it's only because we
haven't done X, Y and Z, which would cost billions
and billions or is going to cost billions and billions
(12:09):
of pounds and get potent of bills. So I mean, yeah,
there are lots of things. We're staying in the factory.
Reality doesn't seem to put a dent in it. But
at least this is coming from the people who actually
now have a good reason to push back on this
because they'll be the ones that take the flag when
it turns out to be exactly as the stated.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
One of the things one of them says, is it.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
The way you could bring those electricity bills down is
simply to put all those charges that come out of
a variety of different types of regulation and political priority,
to move those charges under the general tax bill and
off electricity building. That would be a clearer way to
do it. But you know, so I have to buy
the money, right, doesn't matter how that works.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah, And I guess from at the moment is that
the Chancellor is already struggling to know how to increase
general taxation without havn't a had all the kind of
indirect costs. So are very doubt that she's going to
go for that unless she's looking for a quick way
to bring down inflation, which you know, I mean, there's
a there's an option there, but I don't know. I
(13:10):
can't see that happen in the master.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
But it's interesting, isn't it, And that that suggests moving
it onto the general bill, so then it would become
another thing that came out of your tax revenues, and
we're currently not recognizing that a very large part of
your energy bill is effectively tax. If you were to
look at it like that.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Well, I'd say the other thing that people's sort of
forgetting about the budget is that most of the forecasts
at the moment assume, as they always do every year,
that petrol tax is going to go back up and
line with the thing that was promised, you know whatever,
fifteen years ago and has never actually been done. So
the assumption at the moment is that Rachel Reeves will
(13:53):
get ready they kind of the the tax holiday on
that that she soon put in and also increase it.
So be interesting to see how she kind of deals
with that particular issue as well. So you know, I
can't see energy tax kind of going on top of
that because you've alreadea people very angry about increasing increases
(14:16):
in petrol prices. If she does to say that it
is taking me one fees the fuel tax, well, I.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Suspect that whatever she chooses in this upcoming budget, there's
going to be quite a lot of angry people either way,
and we will be at the forefront of that anger
right commenting on it the whole way through. Anyway, at
least things are going oh way, which is not necessarily
a good way, but they're going our way. Outbreaks of
reality we approve of those. If you see any outbreaks
(14:43):
of reality around you, do let us know. Thank you
for listening to this week's Marendalk's Money Debrief.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
You like us, your rate, review and subscribe whatever you
listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Also be sure to follow me and John on ex
or Twitter. I'm at mariners w and John is John
underscoo Stepec.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
This episode was produced by Somersadi. Sound designed by Blake
Mabels and Aaron Casper.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Questions and comments on the show and all our shows
are always welcome. Our show emailer is Marimanie at Bloomberg
dot net
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Welcome to the Maren
Talks Money Market Wrap while we talk about the biggest
moves in markets this week and what is driving them.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I'm Marren Zumset, Web editor at Large for Bloomberg. You
Go Wealth.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I'm joined Stare Weic, senior report at the Bloomberg and
al sort of them need distilled news.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
Later, said John, I'm reading the papers this morning, and
I'm thinking about all the podcasts we've done over the
last couple of years and how quite often we're going
against mainstream views and talking about the stuff that maybe
other people aren't mad for, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
But looking at the newspapers this morning, it feels to
me like everything is kind of going our way. Are
the things that we expected to happen or happening, and
other people are beginning to agree with us on things.
So look, just let me read you a couple of
the headlines that I'm filling out this morning.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Right, cann't just see this Soon's warden.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I know I'm worried too, and I don't know where
we go next. Off everyone starts agreeing with us. Okay,
go ahead, here we go, attack on undersea cables could
cause civil collapse. Defense grandees have told the Prime Minister
he's running out of time to protect Breaken from catastrophic attack, etc. See,
you know we had that. We talked about that year
and a half ago with Pepper Malgram. Go back and
(01:18):
listening to that, everybody, these big Cold War topics and
the things that Tea talked about, the war in space,
the war under the sea, the wars that you cannot see,
and how interesting they are in handful of Mayle for
our future. Imf urges us to deal with huge deficits
sooner rather than later. As global jet two GDP rises
hit one hundred percent. Now, we have been talking about
(01:38):
that over and over and over. We'll come back to gold.
But gold is the answer to those problems.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
But here's another one that I really like.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Startup extracts lysium in Durham, the sum startup I know,
hoping to extract battery metal from Brian's beneath Northeast England.
Says it aims to produce twenty thousand tons a year
within a decade. Now. We have talked endlessly on this
podcast about the pyer men of need right about how
we focus too much on things at the top, self vacuation,
gender wars, culture bluff, and not enough down the bottom.
(02:07):
Have we got enough of the fundamentals that make us
society work? And we've talked a lot in particular about
all these metals and how we were really serious about
things like energy transition, et cetera, et cetera, would simply
dig up bodmin more. Everyone laughs. And now what is
not exactly bodmin more. But it's outside Durham. These things
are actually happening. And here's another one that we might
come back to. Financiers sound alarm on standards after collapse
(02:30):
exposes riskier lending, riskier lending a private credit who could
have got.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Never never, and also also the fact that the money
behind it is mostly common from banks.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, fascinating.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Well, there's the systemic angle.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
So this brings us back, John.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Every single headline I've just read brings us back to gold. Yes,
the anti anti crisis investment, the anti AI investment, the
anti collapse of private credit investment, the anti everything.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
How that's mat right, Yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I think. Well, one thing I found interesting is the
correlations that we usually see with gold have largely broken down,
and so people are sort of flailing around for reasons
to explain why it's going up. And I just kind
of wrote a piece yesterday looking at the previous times
that gold has that gold has become a bubble, So
(03:24):
the end of the nineteen seventies and two thousand, between
two thousand and eight and twenty eleven, it's pretty clear
those were both times where everyone was basically freaked out
about what looked like a pending collapse in the established
world order. Like you know, the nineteen seventies, people often
talk about the kind of British stay essentially being on
(03:47):
the Vergie collapse, and some people have been talking about
possibly kind of civil war. And then after two thousand
and eight, obviously the financial system actually did collapse and
was then put back together with kind of string and cellotape,
which led to the problems that we have now. So
I think that that's actually the best explanation overall for
why gold is going up, and that at some point
(04:09):
either this stuff will get fixed, at which point gold
will go down and you'll probably wish you'd sold it
at the top. But at the moment, it's still very
hard to see what's on the horizon that could start
that process of things getting fixed or reaching a more
stable equilibrium. Again.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Yeah, it feels like we need to see more of
a crisis before the political will takes this kind of
thing as seriously as we think they should. Or maybe
they're taking it as seriously it should behind the scenes,
just not in public.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
I mean, I always trying to think about this this morning,
and I mean taking it back to the UK. I mean,
one of the points I think we've made here often
is that the UK's fiscal situation is bad, but it's
not desperate in relative terms. And the real problem at
the moment is there's no sense that there's a pathway
(05:03):
out of it that the government is willing to take.
And by the government, I don't just mean this government,
I mean the governments have not been I want to
take if someone actually looks as if they're going to
grasp that nettle, and if that person can then also
get it past their own you know, backbenchers and the voters,
(05:24):
and that I could see that that being a kind
of turning point, or if it was even I mean,
if it was happening in the US. I don't see
it happening in the US. Right away. But there's no
pressure really on the US to deal with this. But
certainly yeah, in the UK, if if you've got a
sense that there was a pathway forward that was going
to actually work, then yeah, you know, maybe we could
(05:47):
start to turn around.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, but the grasping of that netle, I mean, we're
going to have to get onto the budget in November.
In this conversation, the grasping of the nettle involved not
just increasing taxes on the rich whoever whoever they are.
It involves cutting spending. And also, if you have to
increase taxes, increasing taxes across the board, it has to
(06:10):
involve putting out the basic rate of tax. Nothing else
can work. Right, But what we're seeing at the moment,
or the mood music coming out of the Treasury is
not really about cutting spending and fiddle here or there.
But that's not really what this conversation is about. It's
more about the nonsense of those with broad shoulders, who,
as we often say, are using their broad shoulders at
the moment to carry their suitcases to Milan, or to
(06:31):
encourage someone else to carry their suitcases to Milan. So
you know, we know this is all coming and we
can see it going back to one of our favorite
topics in the housing market, which is pretty much certainly
at the top end, completely static.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I mean that's the statistics on in London specifically that
came out in the last kind of week or so
just really staggered on. There was a lane in this
report base I think is Molia. See in the basically,
even if the land was free, is not economic to
build in London just now because they will cost inflation,
(07:09):
but also because there's no demand, because the demand has
basically mostly been filled by investors because you need a
lot of money to afford a property in London. So
and even things like you know, cutting back or in
the amount affordable housing or fiddling with they can have
(07:29):
unnecessary new safety regulations that have been panic rushed down.
Isn't can they do ithing about that?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, this is the line from the report. Development costs
are high, so it is unviable to build profitably in
half of London areas under six hundred and fifty squab foot.
This is even if the land is provided free and
there are no planning obligations.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Yeah, that's bond Culls.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
And I did speak to did speak to a planning lawyer.
Relatively recently, he said that just nothing, nothing thing happening
in central London, nothing at all early that.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
It's one of these things where you don't really know
what to say to that, because clearly the property itself
is unaffordable. But if you then you know, like no
one can afford to buy realistically, But then if no
one can afford to build more, then you're a very
very strange kind of point. It doesn't seem economically rational.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
No, so two things have to happen.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
It needs to be made significantly cheaper to build houses,
which means a bonfire of the regulations again as ever,
land needs to become less expensive one way or another.
But crucially, i'm one of the things that would be
super helpful in the UK would be a rising as
significant rise in real wages.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Yeah, and I mean unfortunately real wages are starting to
tunt flat again because wages are kind of slowly coming down,
And even then the composition is very very very skewed
and me and my own inflation's going back. Hopefully inflation
should edge loorld towards the end of the year, as
(09:05):
long as you don't get any more nasty surprises, which
obviously is you know not.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
The one can Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Yeah, history of nasty surprises is not great.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Well with that in mind, John, actually I wanted to
point to the other outbreak of the recognition of reality
in the UK, and that is that if everyone should
go and look at this video, and in fact we'll
put a link in the show notes to the UK's
big energy bosses talking to Parliamentary.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Oh are you you've wet my schedule?
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I was actually I was thinking this would be one
of your headlines.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
It was, but I meant to state at the beginning,
but you know, I had so many headlines.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I was live, live, live, the best for last.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
But this is a genuine outbreak of reality. Right. So
you've got you've got the big bosses at the big
energy companies in the UK and they are talking to
the Parliamentary Energy Committee and talking about what they call
the non commodity cost of energy. Now, anyone who's long
time listening to this podcast will not be surprised by
any of these things.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Please do go back.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
And listen to some of the podcasts that we have
recently done on energy prices in the UK and how
they work. But the key point here is here is there,
Rachel Fletcher's director of Regulation and Octopus Energy. If we
continue on the path we are on, in all likelihood
electricity prices are going to be twenty percent higher, even
if wholesale prices half.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Now the other.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Representatives from suppliers MEDIFICCCTER who were that agreed with this
because because it's just true that it is not the
wholesale price of energy that is driving up electricity prices
in the UK. And this has now been said very
clearly by industry executives. So the idea that the government
constantly puts out that high electricity prices in the UK
(10:48):
are d a direct result of changes in gas prices
is now being shown very definitively to be not the case,
or certainly not the case according to energy bosses in
the UK. So this is I think a really Christine shift.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Yeah, it's someone's set the part that has been oddly
quiet up until now out loud. I'm guessing it's because
you know, at the end of the day, they're going
to be the ones who are getting pummeled by politicians
when it turns out that they can't meet promises that
politicians made up on their behalf and it has been
made up. I mean, this idea about the three hundred
(11:23):
pound reduction in household bills, I mean, and that has
never been tenable. And it's quite a striking example a
you know, people kind of talk about how Rachel Reeves
can't break the manifesto, pledge and income tax, et cetera.
And then you know, they're allowed to just blatantly make
something up like that, which I find and really not.
(11:45):
I have not been partisan here.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
This is just.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Misinformation and blatant, and I suspect it will continue to
be repeated regardless of this, and I suspect we'll get
lots of people in the comments for this particular podcast
shifting the goalposts about you know, oh yeah, but if
we invested X in the grid, it's only because we
haven't done X, Y and Z, which would cost billions
and billions or is going to cost billions and billions
(12:09):
of pounds and get potent of bills. So I mean, yeah,
there are lots of things. We're staying in the factory.
Reality doesn't seem to put a dent in it. But
at least this is coming from the people who actually
now have a good reason to push back on this
because they'll be the ones that take the flag when
it turns out to be exactly as the stated.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
One of the things one of them says, is it.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
The way you could bring those electricity bills down is
simply to put all those charges that come out of
a variety of different types of regulation and political priority,
to move those charges under the general tax bill and
off electricity building. That would be a clearer way to
do it. But you know, so I have to buy
the money, right, doesn't matter how that works.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah, And I guess from at the moment is that
the Chancellor is already struggling to know how to increase
general taxation without havn't a had all the kind of
indirect costs. So are very doubt that she's going to
go for that unless she's looking for a quick way
to bring down inflation, which you know, I mean, there's
a there's an option there, but I don't know. I
(13:10):
can't see that happen in the master.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
But it's interesting, isn't it, And that that suggests moving
it onto the general bill, so then it would become
another thing that came out of your tax revenues, and
we're currently not recognizing that a very large part of
your energy bill is effectively tax. If you were to
look at it like that.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Well, I'd say the other thing that people's sort of
forgetting about the budget is that most of the forecasts
at the moment assume, as they always do every year,
that petrol tax is going to go back up and
line with the thing that was promised, you know whatever,
fifteen years ago and has never actually been done. So
the assumption at the moment is that Rachel Reeves will
(13:53):
get ready they kind of the the tax holiday on
that that she soon put in and also increase it.
So be interesting to see how she kind of deals
with that particular issue as well. So you know, I
can't see energy tax kind of going on top of
that because you've alreadea people very angry about increasing increases
(14:16):
in petrol prices. If she does to say that it
is taking me one fees the fuel tax, well, I.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Suspect that whatever she chooses in this upcoming budget, there's
going to be quite a lot of angry people either way,
and we will be at the forefront of that anger
right commenting on it the whole way through. Anyway, at
least things are going oh way, which is not necessarily
a good way, but they're going our way. Outbreaks of
reality we approve of those. If you see any outbreaks
(14:43):
of reality around you, do let us know. Thank you
for listening to this week's Marendalk's Money Debrief.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
You like us, your rate, review and subscribe whatever you
listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Also be sure to follow me and John on ex
or Twitter. I'm at mariners w and John is John
underscoo Stepec.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
This episode was produced by Somersadi. Sound designed by Blake
Mabels and Aaron Casper.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Questions and comments on the show and all our shows
are always welcome. Our show emailer is Marimanie at Bloomberg
dot net
Host
Merryn Somerset Webb
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