Liz Truss to urge government to cut taxes – and insist her economic plan would have worked
Liz Truss is set to urge the government to cut taxes – and insist her plan to grow the economy would eventually have worked.
A year on from her disastrous mini-budget, the former Tory prime minister will also say it was unfair to suggest her programme of tax cuts, amounting to £45bn, was unfunded.
She and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, were in a “rush” to get “results”, she will admit during a speech at the Institute for Government thinktank in central London on Monday.
But Ms Truss will also blame her swift demise on reaction from the “political and economic establishment which fed into the markets”.
Her remarks come after the former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, launched a scathing attack on Ms Truss – accusing her government of turning Britain into “Argentina on the Channel”.
In her speech, Ms Truss will say: “I was effectively forced into a policy reversal under the threat of a UK meltdown.”
She will also claim that describing her planned tax cuts as unfunded is “not a fair or accurate description”.
Ms Truss will add: “Independent calculations by the Centre for Economics and Business Research suggest that cutting the higher rate of income tax and the ‘tourist tax’ would have increased rather than decreased revenues within five years.
“So quite the opposite of being unfunded, these tax cuts could have increased funding for our public services.”
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Truss’s time as PM, one year on
The policies of her successor, Rishi Sunak, will come under fire too.
Ms Truss, who was in office for only 49 days, will claim Mr Sunak’s government has spent £35bn more than she would have had she remained in Downing Street.
“Investment would not have faltered in the North Sea, were it not for the windfall tax,” she will say.
“We would have got moving on fracking and lower energy bills would now be on the horizon.
“A more competitive rate of corporation tax would have persuaded the likes of AstraZeneca not to relocate elsewhere.
“There would have been more duty-free shoppers and a boom in the number of self-employed.”
Liz Truss before resigning as prime minister last October
Read more:
Kwasi Kwarteng feels ‘let down’ by Liz Truss
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Ahead of Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement, Ms Truss will call for corporation tax to be reduced back down to 19%.
She will also suggest binning the tourist tax (VAT imposed on visitors) and abolishing the windfall tax.
Ahead of her address, Labour frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth has written to the prime minister, calling on him to block Ms Truss’s yet-to-be published resignation honours list.
In the letter to Mr Sunak, Mr Ashworth said: “Families and business across Britain are still paying (the) price for the Conservative Party crashing the economy and leaving working people worse off, with higher taxes, higher mortgages and higher food and energy bills.
“Despite this, it has been widely reported that Liz Truss has submitted up to 14 people to receive resignation honours.
“This means that those who crashed the economy, who left millions to pay more for their mortgage and who undermined our economic institutions could receive an award.
“I urge you to block these honours.”
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper mocked Ms Truss.
She said: “Liz Truss giving a speech on economic growth is like an arsonist giving a talk on fire safety.”
Blockchain gaming company Wemade is pushing for a Korean won-based stablecoin ecosystem, forming a Global Alliance for KRW Stablecoins (GAKS) with Chainalysis, CertiK and SentBe as founding partners.
Wemade announced that the alliance will support StableNet, a dedicated mainnet for Korean won-backed stablecoins, with publicly released code and a consortium model that aims to meet institutional and regulatory requirements.
Within the partnership, Chainalysis will integrate threat detection and real-time monitoring, while CertiK will handle node validation and security audits.
Money transfer company SentBe will contribute licensed remittance infrastructure across 174 countries. This allows the KRW stablecoin initiative to operate within South Korea’s regulated digital asset ecosystem.
The launch marks a coordinated effort from Wemade to reposition itself as a long-term infrastructure builder after years of setbacks, including token delistings and a bridge hack that undermined investor confidence.
Wemade’s rocky road and stablecoin pivot
Wemade’s push into stablecoin infrastructure follows a turbulent seven-year expansion from a traditional gaming studio into one of South Korea’s most ambitious blockchain builders.
The company launched its blockchain division in 2018 and expanded it from a four-employee team into a 200-person operation. Still, the rapid growth collided with the country’s evolving regulatory landscape, forcing the company to limit its play-to-earn (P2E) offerings to overseas markets.
Much of the pressure faced by Wemade centered on its native WEMIX token. In 2022, South Korean exchanges delisted the asset, citing discrepancies between its reported and actual supply. This resulted in a price drop of over 70% for the token.
The token suffered another major blow in 2024, when a bridge exploit resulted in 9 billion won (about $6 million) in losses. The company’s delayed disclosure attracted scrutiny and eroded further investor trust, leading to a second wave of token delistings.
The stablecoin pivot marks another attempt from Wemade to reset the narrative around the company and reposition its technology toward a more compliant and infrastructure-focused use case.
In a Korea Times report, the company said that it’s developing a KRW-focused stablecoin mainnet while avoiding becoming the stablecoin issuer itself. It’s positioning itself as a technology partner and consortium builder for other South Korean companies.
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South Korea’s post-Terra regulatory landscape
The Terra collapse in 2022 continues to cast a shadow over South Korea’s digital asset policy, leaving lawmakers and regulators particularly sensitive to risks associated with stablecoins.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Bank of Korea (BOK) have taken uncompromising stances since 2022, pushing for stricter liquidity, oversight and disclosure rules as they work on an upcoming stablecoin framework focused on risk-cointainment.
The central bank also advocated giving banks a leading role in stablecoin issuance, helping to mitigate risks to financial and foreign exchange stability.
The BOK warned that allowing non-banking institutions to take the lead in stablecoin issuance could undermine existing regulations.
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Major cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin is the latest company to secure a license under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) framework.
KuCoin’s European arm, KuCoin EU, secured a MiCA license from the Financial Market Authority of Austria, the company said in a statement shared with Cointelegraph on Friday.
The authorization allows KuCoin EU to offer crypto asset services across 29 countries in the European Economic Area (EEA), excluding Malta, according to the exchange’s representatives.
“Securing the MiCA license with our local entity in Austria is a defining milestone in KuCoin’s long-term trust and compliance strategy,” KuCoin CEO BC Wong said, adding that the regulatory framework is “one of the highest regulatory standards worldwide.”
Vienna as a strategic European crypto hub
KuCoin’s MiCA approval follows its license application filed in early 2025, arriving months after several crypto asset providers (CASPs), including Austria-based Bitpanda, had already secured MiCA authorization in other EU member states.
“The decision to choose Austria was primarily driven by the timely implementation of the MiCA accompanying laws, the stable and foreseeable regulatory environment as well as the huge talent pool,” the exchange said in a statement in February.
Alongside KuCoin, Austria’s FMA has issued MiCA licenses to five more CASPs: crypto-friendly Amina Bank, Bitpanda, Bybit, Cryptonow and FIOR Digital.
“This milestone strengthens KuCoin’s commitment to responsible global expansion,” KuCoin CEO Wong said, adding: “Compliance is not simply a regulatory obligation — it is the foundation of our long-term mission to deliver secure, innovative, and accessible digital asset services to users worldwide.”
Related: Blockrise wins Dutch MiCA license, brings Bitcoin-backed loans to EU businesses
Cointelegraph contacted KuCoin for comment regarding the Malta exception, but had not received a response by the time of publication.
As previously mentioned, Malta has issued multiple MiCA licenses to CASPs like Blockchain.com and the Winklevoss twins-owned Gemini exchange. Malta has also emerged as a major opponent of centralized MiCA supervision within the EU, contrary to the position of member states such as France.
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The IMF dropped an explanatory video on its X handle today exploring the new phenomenon of tokenized markets.
The international body responsible for ensuring the stability of the global monetary system recognized the advantages of tokenized markets in the video, but warned that they can be prone to flash crashes and are more volatile than traditional markets.
“Tokenization can make financial markets faster and cheaper, but efficiencies from new technologies often come with new risks,” the video said.
IMF lays out benefits of tokenized markets
The video frames tokenization as the next step in money’s evolution, explaining that tokenization can make it “faster and cheaper to buy, own, and sell assets” by cutting down the long chain of intermediaries.
Instead of relying on clearinghouses and registrars, a tokenized market can automate those functions in code.
According to the IMF, researchers studying early tokenized markets have already “found significant cost savings,” with programmability allowing near‑instant settlement and more efficient collateral use.
Related: Binance adds BlackRock’s BUIDL as off-exchange collateral for institutional traders
Warns of risks tokenization can bring
Still, the IMF stresses that those same efficiencies can amplify familiar dangers. Automated trading has “already led to sudden market plunges known as flash crashes,” and the IMF cautioned that tokenized markets, with instantly executed trading, “can be more volatile” than traditional venues.
In stressed conditions, complex chains of smart contracts “written on top of each other” may interact “like falling dominoes,” turning a local problem into a systemic shock.
The video also highlights the risk of fragmentation if many tokenized platforms emerge that “don’t speak to each other,” undermining liquidity and failing to deliver on the promise of faster, cheaper markets.
It also hinted at increased participation from governments. “Governments have rarely been content to stay on the sidelines during important evolutions of money.”
It added that, if history is any guide, they are likely to take “a more active role in the future of tokenization.”
Governments’ role in money shifts
History is littered with examples of global governments’ participation in monetary evolutions. In 1944, the Bretton Woods agreement saw governments actively redesign the global monetary system, fixing exchange rates to the United States dollar and tying the dollar itself to gold. It was a top‑down decision that shaped cross‑border finance for a generation.
When mounting fiscal costs and external imbalances made the gold peg unsustainable, the collapse of that framework in the early 1970s ushered in fiat currencies and floating exchange rates, alongside structurally larger public‑sector deficits in many advanced economies.
Related: Gold buying boom mirrors Bitcoin’s momentum: Deutsche Bank
IMF research meets a maturing tokenization market
This is not the IMF’s first foray into tokenization. The fund has spent years probing the tokenization market structure and digital money. Shifting that analysis into a public‑facing explainer video shows that tokenization is now seen as a mainstream policy issue, rather than a niche experiment.
Tokenized markets have grown into a multibillion-dollar industry with key players like BlackRock’s BUIDL fund quickly becoming the world’s largest tokenized Treasury fund, surpassing Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund while expanding through 2024 and 2025.
The IMF’s video posits that while tokenization may deliver faster, cheaper and more programmable markets, those markets will grow under close regulatory scrutiny and governments will be ready to intervene.
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