truss is BACK it seems, and still completely hatstand;
Truss claimed that it was “unfair” to blame the mini-budget for the hike in interest rates that happened immediately afterwards.
She said:
On the mortgage point I do want to address this – because we’ve been living in a very low interest rate world and mortgage rates have been going up. The reason there was a specific issue around the time we’re talking about in September, a lot of it is to do with the liability driven investments [LDIs] and the impact they had on the market. So I don’t think it’s fair to blame interest rises on what we did. I think that’s unfair.
This is not the view of most economists.
The Bank of England raises interest rates the day before the mini-budget but, as the Bank of England explained in a memo to the Treasury committee last autumn, long-term gilt yields – the cost of government borrowing – went up sharply after the mini-budget. And it was this that led many mortgage providers to significantly increase the interest rates they were charging UK customers.
