ISSUE NO. 6 · MONDAY 10 AUGUST 2026 Segro's £14.3bn exit, unemployment at 4.9%, and a £19bn tax bill heading for the Budget Eleven firms worth more than £1bn have left London this year, and last week added three more names to the argument rather than slowing it down. Zurich's deal for Beazley ended another FTSE 100 insurer's run. easyJet's board is still weighing Apollo against Castlelake, and the airline leaves the London market whoever wins. The replacement pipeline is the part nobody...
1 day ago • 4 min read
ISSUE NO. 5 · FRIDAY 7 AUGUST 2026 Unemployment at 4.9%, £918m at Legal & General, and a £212bn record at Royal London The UK unemployment rate is 4.9%, up from 4.4% at the election. The survey that measures whether business is actually growing scored 52.2 in July, comfortably above the 50 line. Both of those are true, and employers cut staff anyway for the 22nd month running — the joint-longest run in 30 years of that survey. The only other stretches like it came out of 2008 and the dotcom...
5 days ago • 4 min read
ISSUE NO. 4 · THURSDAY 6 AUGUST 2026 A £19bn tax ask, Beazley's exit, and £160m frozen at Barclays Britain's four biggest lenders have just posted record half-year profits, and the immediate consequence is a campaign to take £19bn off them. That figure is not a forecast, it is an ask, and it lands on a Chancellor who has held the job a month. The awkward part is the £13.7bn the same four handed shareholders in the same breath. Nobody distributes that much and then argues convincingly about...
6 days ago • 3 min read
ISSUE NO. 3 · WEDNESDAY 5 AUGUST 2026 Segro's exit, London's missing listings, and a 6% rating for the Prime Minister Prologis has agreed to buy Segro for £14.3bn, and Segro's shares moved 1%. A FTSE 100 landlord is going at a 39% premium to where it traded before the approach — a price the board spent the summer calling too low. Eleven British companies worth over £1bn have left London this year. The index is not falling apart. It is being bought. What is missing is anything arriving to...
7 days ago • 3 min read
ISSUE NO. 2 · TUESDAY 4 AUGUST 2026 Britain's forecast, easyJet's exit, and an 11% hole in the Nasdaq EY has lifted its UK growth forecast to 0.9% for this year, which sounds like good news until you read the condition attached to it. The whole number assumes the Strait of Hormuz reopens. Keep it shut and the same forecast becomes a 0.2% contraction next year, with inflation running at 6.4% rather than 3.5%. Britain's year, in other words, is being decided several thousand miles from...
8 days ago • 3 min read
ISSUE NO. 1 · MONDAY 3 AUGUST 2026 The three stories that moved UK money last week Last week was earnings week, and the numbers were remarkable in a way that had very little to do with British households. Shell made $9.8bn out of a war. Lloyds made £4.3bn and beat its own target. Schroders passed a record £868bn under management and doubled its half-year profit. Rolls-Royce quietly raised guidance past what the analysts had pencilled in. Four sets of accounts, four beats, one very good...
9 days ago • 3 min read