Blimey, talk about lighting the blue touch-paper and running for the hills!
In the single most cack-handed display of economic incompetence since Gordon Brown sold Britain’s gold at rock-bottom, Rachel Reeves and her Downing Street puppets spent the weeks before the 30 October Budget deliberately leaking the most toxic parts of her fiscal bombshell. The result? A record-breaking £3 BILLION was yanked out of UK equity funds in November alone – the biggest monthly exodus since records began. Pension funds, wealth managers and ordinary punters with ISAs all hit the panic button at the moment the whispers of £40bn in tax hikes, employers’ NI carnage and capital-grab raids hit the wires.
And make no mistake – this wasn’t an accident. This was market manipulation on an industrial scale, orchestrated by a Chancellor who knew exactly what she was doing.
Every calculated “leak” – the £25bn employers’ National Insurance heist, the inheritance-tax farmer massacre, the non-dom purge, the pension contribution relief rumours – was deliberately dripped to the lobby journalists days and weeks in advance. Why? To soften us up, to bounce the markets into pricing in the pain before the Budget statement, and to give her mates in the City time to reposition while the rest of us got shafted.
The numbers don’t lie:
- £3bn net withdrawals from UK equity funds in November (Calastone Fund Flow Index – worst on record)
- £1.2bn ripped out of UK-focused funds in the final week of October alone
- FTSE 100 dropped 4.5% in the run-up to Budget day
- Defined-benefit pension scheme deficits ballooned overnight as gilt yields went haywire
- SIPP and ISA investors stampeded for the exit, crystallising losses just to avoid Reeves’s looming capital gains tax grab
This, this is the textbook definition of using privileged information to distort markets. If a hedge-fund manager did this he’d be in cuffs before breakfast. When a Chancellor does it, she gets a standing ovation from the Labour backbenches.
Let’s call it what it is: state-sponsored market manipulation.
Reeves knew the contents of the Budget weeks in advance. She authorised selective briefings that moved billions. Real people – pensioners, small investors, business owners – lost real money while the Treasury played politics with the nation’s wealth. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a criminal offence under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and the Fraud Act 2006. Minimum sentence? Up to ten years.
So here’s the Loanbuster verdict, loud and clear:
Rachel Reeves should resign tonight.
When she refuses (because narcissists always do), the Director of Public Prosecutions should open an immediate criminal investigation into market abuse, misconduct in public office and conspiracy to defraud the British public.
This wasn’t incompetence. This was a deliberate act of economic sabotage dressed up as “tough choices”. History will judge her as the Chancellor who weaponised terror, who turned the Red Box into a sawn-off shotgun and pointed it at every saver and investor in the land.
We’ve seen this movie before – Brown, Osborne, Kwarteng – but none of them ever sank to premeditated, market-rigging leaks on this scale. Reeves has form: remember her boast that she wanted markets to “mark her homework”? Well they did, love – with a great big red F for Financial Vandalism.
The British public deserve better than a Chancellor who treats the stock market as her personal plaything and our pensions as collateral damage.
Resign. Face the music. And yes – stand trial.
Because if the rule of law means anything in this country, no-one – not even the Chancellor, not the Prime Minister, not the entire bloody Treasury – is above it.
Stay angry, stay vigilant, and for God’s sake move whatever you’ve got left out of Reeves’s reach before she comes back for round two.
Amazon Suggested Reads – Arm Yourself Before the Next Raid
- “The Big Con” – how Britain’s economy was hijacked
- “Taxed to Death” – the ultimate guide to protecting your wealth from HMRC predators
- “Crash Proof Your Portfolio” – because Labour certainly won’t
Ken Frost
Professional Cynic, Chartered Accountant and unrepentant Loanbuster
www.kenfrost.net – fighting the fiscal fascists since 2005
