Why the soaring cost of government borrowing matters for everyone

Published

2 years ago

October 23, 2023

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Except on rare occasions – last year’s post-Liz Truss mini-budget episode being one of them – the bond market rarely garners as much attention as other financial sectors.

Yet these markets, where companies and governments come to borrow, are the foundations for the global economy.

In particular, the value of government bonds – and hence their imputed interest rates – have an enormous bearing on all our lives. Higher bond yields, as these interest rates are called, imply that we will all be paying more interest on that debt for years to come.

So the fact that these interest rates are shooting up rapidly around the world in recent weeks is no trivial matter. On Monday morning, the yield on US 10-year debt (typically seen as a benchmark for this market) broke through the 5% mark.

The UK’s own 10-year government debt is, at 4.7%, now above the highs it hit following last autumn’s mini-budget.

The 30-year UK government bond yield just hit the highest level since 1998. This is big stuff – and indeed the degree of yo-yoing in recent weeks has been unprecedented.

Something is clearly going on in these markets, but what?

This is where things get a little murkier, because it turns out there is no single, definitive explanation for these fluctuations. That comes back to a broader point, which is that the price of a given country’s debt is telling you lots of things at the same time.

It could be telling you about future expectations for where central bank interest rates are heading in future. At one and the same time, it could be signalling how much demand there is in capital markets for a given country’s debt. It could equally be caused by supply: if a government is issuing lots of debt, you might reasonably expect people to ask for higher interest rates to lend them that money.

And the explanation for the recent rise in bond yields could well be all of the above.

A lot of debt

It’s worth saying, before we go into it, that most of this shift seems to be centred on the US economy – but any rise in Treasury yields (those US government bonds are typically referred to as “Treasuries”) has a direct impact on the rest of the world. So it matters for everyone.

Anyway, let’s take the central bank thesis first. Up until quite recently, most economists and investors had been assuming that having risen sharply in recent years, official central bank interest rates would be cut quite rapidly next year – that the shape of the future interest rate curve might resemble the Matterhorn, that Swiss mountain which used to be on the side of Toblerone packages until they stopped making the chocolate in Switzerland.

But central banks, including the US Federal Reserve and Bank of England, have been at pains recently to signal that those rates might not be coming down quite so quickly.

In fact, says Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill, the future path for interest rates might look a bit more like Table Mountain – a long, flat plateau of higher rates.

So that’s one part of the explanation. Another is that right now the US government is borrowing enormous amounts of money, partly to finance its Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, as well as new Biden administration welfare policies.

The combined effect is, according to the Congressional Budget Office, to lift the US national debt up to the highest levels since the aftermath of WWII.

That’s a lot of debt – and while everyone’s known about these plans for some time, it’s possible investors are only now beginning to baulk at the prospect of absorbing all that debt.

Dangerous territory

The final explanation, which is considerably more speculative but also more unsettling, comes back to something else.

You may recall that after Russia invaded Ukraine, Western nations talked about doing what they could to ensure Russia would pay for reconstruction in Ukraine, including potentially seizing Russian assets held in Western nations.

No one is entirely sure how this would work, but at the recent IMF annual meetings in Marrakech, the group of seven leading economies (the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Canada and Italy) agreed to begin working on it.

As I say, no one is entirely sure how this should be done. It might be possible to confiscate some of the interest payments which might otherwise have been due to Russia, earned by Russian assets held in Europe.

But the G7 is also aware that this is dangerous territory, begging questions about the function of international law and the international monetary system.

It also sends a pretty clear message to other countries. If the G7 is content to start seizing Russian assets in their countries then what is to stop them doing likewise with, say, Chinese assets?

Perhaps you see where this is going. At the moment, China is one of the biggest buyers of US government debt, and there is evidence that it is slowing its purchases of US government debt.

Might that be because it’s somewhat spooked by the ongoing efforts to recoup money from Russia? Might Chinese authorities worry that something similar could or would happen to its holdings of US Treasuries if it invaded Taiwan? No one knows for sure, but this is another not altogether implausible explanation for those higher bond yields.

All of which is to say: it’s complicated. But it’s also quite scary. And higher interest rates mean higher debt repayment costs for this country in the coming years.

The ability of this government (or a possible future Labour government) to borrow to finance big projects in future depends on being able to borrow at a reasonable interest rate. And those interest rates are getting considerably higher.

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Vodafone internet services down for thousands of users

Published

8 hours ago

October 13, 2025

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Vodafone internet services down for thousands of users

Tens of thousands of Vodafone users are reporting problems with their internet

The outages began on Monday afternoon, according to the monitoring website DownDetector, which reported more than 130,000 issues with Vodafone connections.

A spokeswoman for the company said: “We are aware of a major issue on our network currently affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services.

“We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to resolve this as soon as possible.”

The company has more than 18 million UK customers, with nearly 700,000 of those using Vodafone’s home broadband connection.

Vodafone users vented their frustration on social media.

“It’s like Vodafone has just been wiped off the earth. Not a single thing works,” said one X user.

The Vodafone app also appeared to be down for users, with the company’s website briefly going down too.

The ‘network status checker’ on the website was also down, and when Sky News tried to test the customer helpline, it did not ring.

“There’s Vodafone down and then there’s Vodafone wiped off the face of the f***ing planet,” posted another X user.

Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, said the outage shows how reliant we are on modern infrastructure like mobile networks.

“Outages will always naturally raise early suspicions of a potential cyber incident, though current evidence points more towards an internal network failure than a confirmed attack,” said Mr Moore.

“The sudden outage, combined with the inability to access customer service lines, mirrors classic symptoms of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, where attackers overwhelm the network so the site or systems collapse.

“However, malicious or not, this once again highlights our heavy reliance on digital infrastructure, especially in an age where we increasingly depend on mobile networks for everything,” he said.

“Ultimately, resilience is essential, whether the cause is a direct cyberattack, a supply chain issue or a critical internal error.”

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Lloyds estimates £1.95bn hit from motor finance scandal

Published

17 hours ago

October 13, 2025

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Lloyds estimates £1.95bn hit from motor finance scandal

Lloyds Banking Group has set aside a further £800m to cover estimated costs associated with the car finance mis-selling scandal.

The bank said the sum took its total provision to £1.95bn.

It had been assessing the impact since the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) revealed last week it was consulting on a compensation scheme, with up to 14.2 million car finance agreements potentially eligible for payouts.

The regulator had previously found that many lenders failed to disclose commission paid to brokers, which could have led to customers paying more than they should have between April 2007 and November 2024.

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Eligible customers could receive an average of £700 each under the proposals.

Lloyds said on Monday that it would be contributing to the consultation to argue a number of points.

It said: “The Group remains committed to ensuring customers receive appropriate redress where they suffered loss, however the Group does not believe that the proposed redress methodology outlined in the consultation document reflects the actual loss to the customer. Nor does it meet the objective of ensuring that consumers are compensated proportionately and reasonably where harm has been demonstrated.

“In addition, the approach to unfairness in the redress scheme does not align with the legal clarity provided by the recent Supreme Court judgment in Johnson, in which unfairness was assessed on a fact specific basis and against a non-exhaustive list of multiple factors. The Group will make representations to the FCA accordingly.”

Shares in Lloyds, which fell last week when the bank warned of a potential “material” increase in its provisions, gained more than 0.5% on Monday.

The estimated compensation figure came in below the sum some financial analysts had predicted.

The shares remain more 50% up in the year to date.

Another listed lender exposed to car loan mis-selling is also expected to raise the amount it has set aside.

Close Brothers, which has a £165m provision currently, saw its shares tumble 7% when it admitted an increase was likely once its analysis of the compensation consultation documents was completed.

Car finance makes up approximately a quarter of its total loan book.

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Farming community responds to rumours of an inheritance tax U-turn

Published

17 hours ago

October 13, 2025

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Farming community responds to rumours of an inheritance tax U-turn

The budget may still be more than six weeks away, but rumours of U-turns and changes are already in full swing.

Over the last few days, there have been multiple reports that those inside Whitehall are considering tweaks to the controversial inheritance tax (IHT) reforms on farms announced this time last year.

Plans to introduce a 20% tax on estates worth more than £1m drew tens of thousands to protest in London, many fearing huge tax bills that would force small farms to sell up for good.

Now there are reports the tax threshold could be increased from £1m to £5m (£10m for a married couple) – a shift that would remove smaller farms from being liable to pay.

Senior figures in farming have long believed a rise could be the solution to save the smaller farms and it would satisfy most.

However under the proposals, the 50% relief on IHT would be removed for farms above the new threshold.

That means bigger farms, responsible for producing a large amount of produce in our supermarkets, could bear the brunt of the tax burden with the Treasury potentially increasing revenues.

Two senior farming figures told me today that while a threshold increase is welcome, it does nothing to solve an “insolvable” problem.

Big farms have more land to sell, but then they become smaller farms and either produce less, or even divide up, to avoid the tax entirely.

Richard Cornock runs a small dairy farm in south Gloucestershire, which has been in his family since 1822.

He hopes to pass it on to his son Harry, who is now 14 and training to become a farm manager.

“I’ve been under so much stress like most farmers worrying about this tax,” he said. “And I really hope they do push the boundaries on the thresholds, because the million pounds they propose at the moment is ridiculous.

“It’s been on my mind the whole time to be honest. I even looked into getting life insurance to insure my life and I can’t get it because I had a heart condition. And that was one way I thought I might be able to cover my kids…”

We paused our chat as he was too upset to continue – an illustration of the stress farmers like him have been under over the last 12 months.

The government says it won’t comment on “speculation” about any possible changes, but it has previously defended the IHT reform, saying most estates would not pay and that those who will be liable can spread payments over a decade.

Labour is under pressure to do something to appease the angry farmers, a rural vote that turned from the Conservatives at the last election.

I ask Richard whether any tweak or row back on IHT will restore faith in Labour?

“The damage has been done,” he says.