Rachel Reeves is coming out fighting as she prepares to unveil billions in cuts

Published

2 days ago

March 23, 2025

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In recent months, the chancellor has become a lightning rod for criticism.

She been accused of ushering in a new era of austerity and channelling George Osborne with governments cuts to welfare, winter fuel and international aid.

She’s been described as a new Liz Truss, with her focus on growth and tearing up regulation.

She’s been urged to hike taxes for the wealthy by left-wing Labour MPs.

She’s been under pressure to loosen her self-imposed fiscal rules – even Lord Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, has called on her to allow more government borrowing.

As for the Tories, they claim she’s facing a crisis of her own making after trash-talking the economy and damaging business confidence by hiking national insurance on employers.

But if the pressure is taking its toll on Rachel Reeves, it didn’t show this morning.

She breezed into the Sky News Westminster studio for her interview on Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips and positively beamed when he asked about the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) preparing to slash its growth forecasts, reportedly by as much as half, and the severity of the country’s financial situation.

She insisted the “world has changed” since her October budget and said the government is responding through greater investment in defence and security.

The chancellor has clearly decided to come out fighting.

She’s wedded to her fiscal rules, she’s sticking to her promise not to cut taxes, and determinedly standing by the decisions she took in the October budget.

“I promised at the general election to bring stability back to the economy – and as a result of that stability, interest rates have been cut three times since the general election,” she said.

“That’s only been possible because we put our public finances on a firm footing, and we’ve also put our public services on a firm footing.”

There was no real acknowledgement that cuts in interest rates have now stalled and economic growth is flatlining.

She brushed off the prospect of a more negative outlook by deferring again and again to the as-yet-unpublished OBR forecast.

“I know that we need to go further and faster in delivering economic growth and seeing public services improve – but there are no shortcuts here,” she said. “It’s not possible within just a few months to reverse more than a decade of economic stagnation, but we are making the changes that are necessary to bring money into the economy.”

It’s clearly part of the chancellor’s job to talk up the economy they’re responsible for. But the strategy here was to show no hint of weakness.

The spring statement is already done and dusted as it had to be submitted to the OBR last week for its forecasts to be prepared and printed.

So there’s no way back now on the likely cuts to come.

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We’re expecting the chancellor to set out savings of around £10bn, including the £5bn of welfare savings announced last week.

Today she confirmed the civil service will be forced to cut £2bn a year by slashing administration costs by the end of the decade – although the savings will be used to protect frontline services from cutbacks.

She told me people who were describing the event as an emergency budget – which implies tax changes – are going to look “very silly” when they hear what she’s got to say on Wednesday.

That’s a dig at shadow chancellor Mel Stride and the Tories, who’ve been doing their best to make the “emergency budget” moniker stick.

You’d think they might want to avoid reminding people of the last emergency budget, which was Jeremy Hunt’s effort to clean up the shrapnel left behind by Liz Truss’s mini budget implosion.

But for Rachel Reeves, it’s an ever-present reminder of what can go wrong.

Politics

SEC closes investigation into Immutable nearly 5 months after Wells notice

Published

4 hours ago

March 25, 2025

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SEC closes investigation into Immutable nearly 5 months after Wells notice

Web3 gaming platform Immutable says the US Securities and Exchange Commission has closed its investigation into the company, clearing it of any further action.

Immutable — the firm behind the Ethereum layer-2 ImmutableX — said in a March 25 statement that the SEC shut its inquiry into the firm without finding wrongdoing and “closes the loop on the Wells notice issued by the SEC last year.”

In November, Immutable said it received a Wells notice from the regulator — a letter informing that the SEC is considering an enforcement action, typically sent after it concludes there is evidence of possible securities law violations.

“We are pleased the SEC has concluded its inquiry. This marks a significant milestone for the crypto industry and gaming as we advance towards a future with regulatory clarity,” Immutable president and co-founder Robbie Ferguson said in a statement.

An Immutable spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the SEC sent it a letter of termination that didn’t explain why it had concluded its probe. The spokesperson said the letter was unprompted and that the SEC’s review of information Immutable had sent “appears to have resulted in them closing the investigation.”

Immutable said in a November blog post that it believed the SEC was targeting the 2021 “listing and private sales” of its self-titled Immutable (IMX) token.

SEC, Tokens, GameFi — *Immutable’s X post after receiving a Wells notice in November 2024. Source:* *Immutable*

The company said it had a 10-minute call with the SEC after it had issued the notice where it alleged a 2021 Immutable blog post stating a pre-launch investment made in the IMX token at a price of $0.10, which was issued at a “$10 pre-100:1 split,” was inaccurate and implied there was no exchange of value between the parties.

At the time, Immutable said it was “confident in its position” and would fight the regulator’s claims.

The SEC has dropped many pending and in progress enforcement actions against crypto companies under President Donald Trump, whose administration has worked to defang the agency to make good on his promise to alleviate the crypto industry from regulatory action.

Last month, the SEC stopped its investigations into non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea, trading platform Robinhood, decentralized exchange developer Uniswap Labs and crypto exchange Gemini.

The regulator has also dropped a slew of its high-profile lawsuits against crypto firms, including those against Ripple Labs, Coinbase and Kraken.

Despite the SEC backing off from Immutable, the Manhattan-based Rosen Law Firm has cited the Wells notice in trying to spin up a securities class-action lawsuit against the firm over its IMX token offering, which Immutable’s spokesperson said it’s “not concerned about.”

In its statement, Immutable said that major triple AAA gaming studios “have previously cited legal and compliance risks as key barriers to entry” into the Web3 gaming space.

“However, with a clear regulatory framework on the horizon, this is expected to unlock further investment and opportunities to tokenize the now more than $100 billion market for in-game purchases,” it added.

Web3 Gamer: Classic Sega, Atari and Nintendo games get crypto makeovers

Politics

Spring statement: Rachel Reeves can make decisions on spending cuts without too much fallout for now – but worse could be yet to come

Published

5 hours ago

March 25, 2025

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Spring statement: Rachel Reeves can make decisions on spending cuts without too much fallout for now - but worse could be yet to come

Rachel Reeves will keep her remarks short when she delivers the spring statement on Wednesday.

But the enormity of what she is saying will be lost on no one as the chancellor sets out the grim reality of the country’s finances.

Her economic update to the House of Commons will reveal a deteriorating economic outlook and rising borrowing costs, which has forced her to find spending cuts, which she’s left others to carry the can for (more on that in a bit).

Politics Live: Polling suggests almost everyone is pessimistic

The independent Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) is expected to forecast that growth for 2025 has halved from 2% to 1%.

That, combined with rising debt repayment costs on government borrowing, has left the chancellor with a black hole in the public finances against the forecasts published at the budget in October.

Back then, Reeves had a £9.9bn cushion against her “iron-clad” fiscal rule that day-to-day spending must be funded through tax receipts not debt by 2029-30.

But that surplus has been wiped out in the ensuing six months – now she finds herself about £4bn in the red, according to those familiar with the forecasts.

That’s really uncomfortable for a chancellor who just months ago executed the biggest tax and spend budget in a generation with the promise that she would get the economy growing again.

At the first progress check, she looks to be failing and has been forced into finding spending cuts to make up the shortfall after ruling out her other two options – further tax rises or more borrowing via a loosening of her self-imposed fiscal rules.

‘World has changed’

When Reeves gets up on Wednesday, she will put it differently, saying the “world has changed” and all that means is the government must move “further and faster” to deliver the reforms that will drive growth.

But her opponents will be quick to lay economic woes at her door, arguing that the unexpected £25bn tax hike on employers’ national insurance contributions last October have choked off growth.

But it’s not just opposition from the Conservative benches that the chancellor is facing – it is opposition from within as she sets about cutting government spending to the tune of £15bn to fill that black hole.

Politically, her allies know how awkward it would have been for the chancellor to announce £5bn in welfare cuts to avoid breaking her own fiscal rules, with one acknowledging that those cuts had to be kept separate from the spring statement.

There’s also expected to be more than £5bn of extra cuts from public spending in the forecast period, which could see departments that don’t have protected budgets – education, justice, home – face real-term spending cuts by the end of the decade.

Not an emergency budget

We won’t see the detail of that until the Spending Review in June.

This is not an emergency budget because the chancellor isn’t embarking on a round of tax raising to fix the public finances.

But these are, however they are framed, emergency spending cuts designed to plug her black hole and that is politically difficult for a government that has promised no return to austerity if some parts of the public sector face deep cuts to stick with fiscal rules.

If that’s the macro picture, what about the “everyday economics” of peoples’ lives?

I’d point out two things here. On Wednesday, we will get to see where those £5bn of welfare cuts will fall as the government publishes the impact assessment that it held back last week.

Up to a million people could be affected by cuts, and the reality of who will be hit will pile on the pressure for Labour MPs already uncomfortable with cuts to health and disability benefits.

The second point is whether the government remains on course to deliver its key pledge to “put more money in the pockets of working people” during this parliament after the Joseph Rowntree Foundation think-tank produced analysis over the weekend saying living standards for all UK families are set to fall by 2030.

The chancellor told my colleague Trevor Phillips on Sunday that she “rejects” the analysis that the average family could be £1,400 worse off by 2030.

But that doesn’t mean that the forecasts published on Wednesday calculating real household disposable income per head won’t make for grim reading as the economic outlook deteriorates.

Nervousness in Labour

Ask around the party, and there is obvious nervousness about how this might land, with a degree of anxiety about the economic outlook and what that has in store for departmental budgets.

But there is recognition too from many MPs that the government has political space afforded by that whopping majority, to make these decisions on spending cuts without too much fallout – for now.

Because while Wednesday will be bad, worse could be yet to come.

Staring down the barrel

The chancellor is staring down the barrel of a possible global trade war that will only serve to create more economic uncertainty, even if the UK is spared from the worst tariffs by President Donald Trump.

The national insurance hike is also set to kick in next month, with employers across the piece sounding the warnings around investment, jobs and growth.

Six months ago, Reeves said she wouldn’t be coming back for more after she announced £40bn in tax rises in that massive first budget.

Six months on she is coming back for more, this time in the form of spending cuts. And in six months’ time, she may well have to come back for more in the form of tax rises or deeper cuts.

The spring statement was meant to be a run-of-the-mill economic update, but it has morphed into much more.

The chancellor now has the hard sell to make from a very hard place, that could soon become even tougher still.

Politics

Ripple will drop cross-appeal in SEC case, get refund from lower court ruling

Published

5 hours ago

March 25, 2025

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Ripple will drop cross-appeal in SEC case, get refund from lower court ruling

Blockchain firm Ripple Labs’ case with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may be officially wrapped up after more than four years, subject to court approval.

In a March 25 X post, Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty wrote, in ”what should be my last update on SEC v. Ripple ever,” that Ripple will drop its cross-appeal against the SEC in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. An August 2024 judgment from the US District Court for the Southern District of New York finding Ripple liable for $125 million will essentially stand, but the SEC will keep only $50 million of the amount in escrow. The remaining balance will be returned to Ripple.

“The agency will also ask the Court to lift the standard injunction that was imposed earlier at the SEC’s request,” wrote Alderoty. “All subject to Commission vote, drafting of final documents and usual court processes.”

Politics, Ripple, SEC, Court — *Ripple chief legal officer statement on latest development with SEC case. Source:* *Stuart Alderoty*

Alderoty’s announcement came less than a week after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the SEC would drop its appeal over the August 2024 judgment. At the time of publication, neither the SEC nor Ripple appeared to have made any filing in the Second Circuit since Jan. 31 or in SDNY since October.

The Ripple CLO told Cointelegraph on March 11 that both the SEC and blockchain firm agreeing to drop their respective appeal and cross-appeal would allow the lower court’s $125-million judgment to stand. However, both parties could go “hand-in-hand” to SDNY Judge Analisa Torress to request a modification of the judgment.

Getting Ripple involved in politics

The SEC v. Ripple case, filed by the commission under US President Donald Trump in December 2020, was one of the agency’s longest-running enforcement cases against a major US crypto company.

Garlinghouse said in an interview aired in December 2024 that the firm may not have gotten as involved in US politics if the commission had been led by someone other than former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, despite the Ripple case being filed under then-Chair Jay Clayton.

During the 2024 election cycle, Ripple contributed $45 million to the political action committee Fairshake to support “pro-crypto” candidates and pledged $5 million in XRP to Trump’s inauguration fund. Alderoty suggested to Cointelegraph that the SEC dropping cases was “independent” of any political donations.

Since the Nov. 5 election in which Trump defeated then-Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, Garlinghouse and Alderoty have attended Washington, DC events during the inauguration as official guests, and the CEO joined in a March 7 summit at the White House in which the Trump discussed his plans for stablecoins and a crypto regulatory framework.

On March 27, members of the Senate Banking Committee will consider the nomination of former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to return to chair the agency. He is expected to face questions over his positions on crypto regulation and potential conflicts of interest.

Magazine: Ripple says SEC lawsuit ‘over,’ Trump at DAS, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 16 – 22