Our readers are too stupid to understand financial arbitrage and very basic macroeconomics, so we will pretend financial markets are like economic oracles or jealous gods. This seems to be the attitude of much of the media when it comes to events like the Budget.
Let me start with a brief summary of what actually happened after the Budget. For those who want a more detailed account and can read the FT, this from Toby Nangle is (of course) very good and very clear. The Budget was what macroeconomists call expansionary, which means that it had the effect of increasing the total demand for UK produced goods and services. This was because government spending was increased by more than taxes, with the balance made up with higher borrowing. An expansionary budget tends to raise output in the short term compared to what it otherwise would have been, which puts upward pressure on inflation. This in turn will mean that interest rates set by the Bank of England are likely to be higher than they otherwise would have been in the short term as a result of the Budget.
The financial markets, like most commentators including myself, had been expecting a Budget like this, but the degree of expansion was a bit more than average market expectations. As a result, these markets revised up a little their expectations of near term rates set by the Bank, which because of financial arbitrage meant that interest rates on financial assets with a longer term duration, like government debt (‘gilts’), increased slightly after the Budget.
How this was portrayed in the media depended on politics. Among the propaganda media in particular there were clearly some who wanted to make this into Labour’s Truss event. It has
