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Markets give a cautious welcome to Reeves’ messy UK budget

LONDON — Financial markets gave a cautious welcome to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ budget — to the extent that they could make sense of it.

The presentation of the U.K. government’s fiscal plans for the next year was badly disrupted when the Office for Budget Responsibility accidentally published its analysis of the bill before Reeves had even announced it in parliament. That forced investors into a frantic search for its key details.

As the initial uncertainties lifted, the pound rose by 0.2 percent against the dollar and a little more against the euro, on the key takeaway that the annual tax take will rise by £26 billion by the 2029-2030 fiscal year. That will squeeze the budget deficit and give Reeves more room for maneuver in the event of a fresh downturn.

“The Chancellor more than doubled her fiscal headroom from around £10 billion to just under £22 billion,” Deutsche Bank analyst Sanjay Raja said in a note to clients.

Such considerations should reduce the U.K.’s vulnerability to swings in global financial markets, which has been exposed more than once in a year when U.S. President Donald Trump has upended the global trading order. Investors had worried all year that a global economic slowdown could push Britain in the direction of a debt crisis.

But Reeves now estimates the budget deficit will fall to 1.9 percent of GDP by 2030, from 4.5 percent of GDP in the current year. That will stabilize the debt ratio well below 100 percent of GDP, but at a cost. By freezing income tax thresholds for the rest of this parliament, and by a host of smaller measures, Reeves will raise the overall tax take to a record 38 percent of gross domestic product, according to the OBR.

The new debt trajectory generated a measure of relief in bond markets, visible in a drop of 0.05 percentage points in the government’s key 10-year borrowing cost to 4.44 percent by 2 p.m. in London. That was the lowest since the leak of Reeves abandoning her planned increase in income tax rates two weeks ago.

It also fed through into slightly stronger expectations of interest rate cuts from the Bank of England. The two-year gilt yield, which closely tracks expectations of the Bank Rate, fell 0.03 percentage points to a 15-month low of 3.74 percent.

Reeves was careful to avoid the mistakes of her last budget which, by raising regulated prices sharply, drove headline inflation back to 4 percent over the summer. In her statement on Tuesday, she went in the other direction, freezing rail and bus fares and removing some of the government-directed charges on energy bills. The OBR said these measures would take 0.4 percent off the rate of inflation over the next year.

“I have cut the cost of living with money off bills and prices frozen,” Reeves said. Deutsche’s Raja said the measures would have a “modest but meaningful” impact on inflation, making the Bank’s job “slightly easier” for the next 12 months.

The Bank of England held off from cutting the key Bank Rate at its latest Monetary Policy Committee meeting this month, despite increasingly signs of the job market weakening. Most analysts had said at the time they would expect a cut in December, as long as the budget didn’t add to inflationary pressures.

LP Staff Writers

Writers at Lord’s Press come from a range of professional backgrounds, including history, diplomacy, heraldry, and public administration. Many publish anonymously or under initials—a practice that reflects the publication’s long-standing emphasis on discretion and editorial objectivity. While they bring expertise in European nobility, protocol, and archival research, their role is not to opine, but to document. Their focus remains on accuracy, historical integrity, and the preservation of events and individuals whose significance might otherwise go unrecorded.

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