Jeremy Hunt says ‘I don’t yet know’ if govt can cut taxes again before election after National Insurance reduction
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is unsure if the government can afford further tax cuts – as a National Insurance (NI) reduction comes into force today.
The pre-election cut to NI, from 12% to 10%, will impact around 27 million payroll employees across the UK.
A person earning the UK’s average salary of £35,000 will save £450 a year, or £37.38 a month, as a result of this change.
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See how much your pay will change
Mr Hunt said the reduction, announced in his Autumn Statement last year, means “that a typical family with two earners will be nearly a thousand pounds better off this year”.
But Labour argued this wasn’t true, saying frozen income tax and national insurance thresholds mean that many families have been drawn into higher tax bands.
The Opposition’s new attack ads criticising the policy even made it onto the Tory-supporting website Conservative Home on Friday.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said: “Under Rishi Sunak’s raw deal, for every extra £10 people are paying in tax they are only getting £2 back.”
Labour attack ad
‘If I can afford to go further I will’
In a statement on Saturday, Mr Hunt said he wanted to further ease the tax burden, which is expected to rise to the highest level since the Second World War before the end of this decade, but he doesn’t yet know if he can.
He called the NI reduction “the start of a process”, adding: “If I can afford to go further I will… I don’t yet know if I can.
“We want to do this because it helps families, it also helps to grow the economy, and we believe that a lightly taxed economy will grow faster and in the end that’ll mean more money for public services like the NHS.”
Mr Hunt argued the Conservative government “wants to bring down taxes” and recognises that “families are finding life really tough”.
But he defended its previous measures, saying: “It was right to support families through COVID and through the cost of living crisis, and yes taxes had to go up in that period.”
The government says its NI reduction is the biggest tax cut on record for workers.
The chancellor added: “Even after the effect of the tax rises that have happened previously, this means that a typical family will see their taxes go down next year.”
Jeremy Hunt leaves Downing Street to deliver the autumn statement in the Commons
Will Hunt cut taxes again before election?
The clock is ticking for Mr Hunt to find the fiscal headroom to cut taxes again.
The spring budget, pencilled in for 6 March, will be the last chance for him to make major tax and spending promises before the election, which Mr Sunak has said will likely be in the second half of the year.
Following the Autumn Statement in November, the government has faced pressure from Tory MPs to go further and cut income tax or inheritance tax.
While many campaigners welcomed the National Insurance changes, they pointed out that the tax burden remains at record high levels for Britons – thanks in part to the threshold at which people start paying personal taxes being frozen, rather than rising with inflation.
Mr Sunak introduced the current tax freezes when he was chancellor back in 2021 and as prime minister, extended the time they would need to be in place, from 2026 to 2028.
This causes a so-called “fiscal drag” as pay goes up but tax thresholds don’t, so more people are dragged into higher tax brackets.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said the Autumn Statement gave back just £1 in tax cuts for every £4 of tax rises due to threshold freezes since 2021.
Ms Reeves claimed that despite the NI cut, the average family was paying £1,200 extra tax this year “because of choices by Rishi Sunak and this Conservative government”.
“Never have people paid so much in tax and got so little in return in the form of public services,” she said.
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However, the Labour leadership has not committed to cutting tax or unfreezing the thresholds if they win the election.
Sir Keir Starmer told Sky News his priority is to grow the economy and he won’t make promises he can’t keep – but that he does want to “lower the burden of working people”.
The new trade tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump may place added pressure on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem both domestically and globally, according to one industry executive.
While the US is home to Bitcoin (BTC) mining manufacturing firms such as Auradine, it’s still “not possible to make the whole supply chain, including materials, US-based,” Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at BTC mining tech provider Braiins, told Cointelegraph.
On April 2, Trump announced sweeping tariffs, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries that export to the US and introducing “reciprocal” levies targeting America’s key trading partners.
Community members have debated the potential effects of the tariffs on Bitcoin, with some saying their impact has been overstated, while others see them as a significant threat.
Tariffs compound existing mining challenges
Csepcsar said the mining industry is already experiencing tough times, pointing to key indicators like the BTC hashprice.
Hashprice — a measure of a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power spent to mine BTC blocks — has been on the decline since 2022 and dropped to all-time lows of $50 for the first time in 2024.
According to data from Bitbo, the BTC hashprice was still hovering around all-time low levels of $53 on March 30.
Bitcoin hashprice since late 2013. Source: Bitbo
“Hashprice is the key metric miners follow to understand their bottom line. It is how many dollars one terahash makes a day. A key profitability metric, and it is at all-time lows, ever,” Csepcsar said.
He added that mining equipment tariffs were already increasing under the Biden administration in 2024, and cited comments from Summer Meng, general manager at Chinese crypto mining supplier Bitmars.
Source: Summer Meng
“But they keep getting stricter under Trump,” Csepcsar added, referring to companies such as the China-based Bitmain — the world’s largest ASIC manufacturer — which is subject to the new tariffs.
Trump’s latest measures include a 34% additional tariff on top of an existing 20% levy for Chinese mining imports. In response, China reportedly imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on April 4.
BTC mining firms to “lose in the short term”
Csepcsar also noted that cutting-edge chips for crypto mining are currently massively produced in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were hit by new 32% and 25% tariffs, respectively.
“It will take a decade for the US to catch up with cutting-edge chip manufacturing. So again, companies, including American ones, lose in the short term,” he said.
Source: jmhorp
Csepcsar also observed that some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States region, including Russia and Kazakhstan, have been beefing up mining efforts and could potentially overtake the US in hashrate dominance.
Related: Bitcoin mining using coal energy down 43% since 2011 — Report
“If we continue to see trade war, these regions with low tariffs and more favorable mining conditions can see a major boom,” Csepcsar warned.
As the newly announced tariffs potentially hurt Bitcoin mining both globally and in the US, it may become more difficult for Trump to keep his promise of making the US the global mining leader.
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted multiple times over the years. As his administration embraces a more pro-crypto agenda, it remains to be seen how the latest economic policies will impact his long-term strategy for digital assets.
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Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is under renewed regulatory scrutiny in Europe after Maltese authorities issued a major fine for violations of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) fined Okcoin Europe — OKX’s Europe-based subsidiary — 1.1 million euros ($1.2 million) after detecting multiple AML failures on the platform in the past, the authority announced on April 3.
While admitting that OKX has significantly improved its AML policies in the past 18 months, the authority “could not ignore” its past compliance failures from 2023, “some of which were deemed to be serious and systematic,” the FIAU notice said.
OKX was among the first crypto exchanges to receive a license under Europe’s new Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation via its Malta hub in January 2025.
The news of the $1.2 million penalty in Malta came after Bloomberg in March reported that European Union regulators were probing OKX for laundering $100 million in funds from the Bybit hack.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou previously claimed that OKX’s Web3 proxy allowed hackers to launder about $100 million, or 40,233 Ether (ETH), from the $1.5 billion hack that occurred in February.
This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.
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Authorities in the US state of Massachusetts continue targeting unlawful cryptocurrency market practices, with a local court fining crypto financial services firm CLS Global.
A federal court in Boston on April 2 sentenced CLS Global on criminal charges related to fraudulent manipulation of crypto trading volume, according to an announcement from the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office.
In addition to a $428,059 fine, the court prohibited CLS Global from offering services in the US for a probation period of three years.
CLS Global, a crypto market maker registered in the United Arab Emirates, in January pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit market manipulation and one count of wire fraud.
CLS agreed to manipulate the FBI’s “trap token” NexFundAI
The charges against CLS Global followed an undercover law enforcement operation involving NexFundAI, a token created by the FBI as part of a sting operation in May 2024.
CLS Global was among at least three firms that took the FBI’s bait and agreed to provide “market maker services” for NexFundAI, including a fraudulent scheme to attract investors to purchase the token.
In October 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced fraud charges against CLS and its employee, Andrey Zhorzhes. The US securities regulator also filed complaints against two other NexFundAI manipulators, Hong Kong-linked ZM Quant Investment and Russia-linked Gotbit Consulting.
CLS Global’s profile
According to CLS Global CEO Filipp Veselov, the company was founded in 2017 to fill in a “huge gap in the market for high-quality market-making solutions and trading consulting.”
Prior to CLS, Veselov worked at the Russian cryptocurrency exchange platform Latoken, which is advertised as a “global digital asset exchange” and has about 370,000 followers on X.
The CLS team also includes chief revenue officer Pavel Singaevskii, who previously served as sales manager at Stex, a crypto platform that reportedly ceased operations without warning in 2023.
Source: CLS Global
According to CLS Global’s X page, the platform continues operating and has more than 110,000 followers at the time of publication.
How much wash trading is in crypto?
Wash trading is an illegal practice involving artificially inflating trading volume by repeatedly buying and selling the same asset, generating a misleading perception of demand.
According to a January 2025 report by the US blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the crypto market has at least $2.6 billion in estimated wash traded volumes, or just about 2% of total daily crypto trading volumes, as reported by CoinGecko.
Estimated wash trade volume in crypto. Source: Chainalysis
Related: Russian Gotbit founder strikes $23M plea deal with US prosecutors
Some studies indicate that wash trading makes up a bigger share of the crypto market.
In 2022, the US National Bureau of Economic Research reported that illegal wash trading may account for as much as 70% of average trading volumes on unregulated exchanges.
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