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 mentions: seven new listings have raised £557m all year, and the IPO market is now expected to stay shut into 2027.

The results underneath were strong, which is the awkward part. HSBC restarted its buyback with profit up 60%. Royal London hit a record £212bn of assets while new money more than halved, and Legal & General beat guidance and watched its shares fall. Barclays spent the week arguing over £160m of frozen client cash. The politics ran the other way: 6% of scale-up founders rate Burnham pro-business, his economic advisers turned out to be decorative, and EY's 0.9% growth forecast still rests on a shipping lane reopening. New York supplied the backdrop, with the Nasdaq 11% below June's high and Meta opening cloud talks with Anthropic.

Below in full: the £14.3bn about to leave the FTSE 100, why unemployment reached 4.9% in a month the economy was still growing, and the £19bn tax bill the banks are trying to talk their way out of. After those, the full eight numbers, the week ahead, and one calculator worth five minutes.

Lead

£14.3bn is about to walk out of the FTSE 100. Segro's shares moved 1%.

Prologis has agreed the takeover at a 39% premium to where Segro traded before the first approach, and £1.7bn above the £12.6bn the board rejected last month. Shareholders take Prologis stock with a £3.5bn partial cash alternative, and completion is expected in the first half of next year. The muted reaction is the tell — the market settled this weeks ago. It is not really a story about warehouses or data centres. It is about where large British assets get priced, and eleven firms worth more than £1bn have now left London this year. Read the full story →

The Numbers

Friday closed the week with the FTSE 250 at its highest close in twelve months and the FTSE 100 within ten points of its own. The gilt is the figure that has not joined in: 5.08% in July, a quarter-point up on June and 1.33 points above Bank Rate, and it is the gilt rather than Bank Rate that prices a fixed mortgage.

More News

Unemployment is 4.9%, up from 4.4% at the election. Business activity scored 52.2 in July.

The private sector cut jobs for the 22nd month running, the joint-longest stretch in 30 years of that survey, and it happened in a month when activity was still expanding. July had a softer edge — the gentlest pace of cuts since October 2025, and input costs at a five-month low. It also had help that does not repeat, with a World Cup and warm weather filling hospitality venues for a few weeks, while oil spiked as hostilities between Iran and the United States flared. Employers took on more work and fewer people to do it. Read the full story →

Positive Money prices a windfall tax on the big four at £19bn. The same four have just handed shareholders £13.7bn.

Two consecutive Budgets have already raised £66bn without touching the banks, and that run looks over now record half-year profits have handed the sector's critics the argument they were missing. The next Budget lands on 28 October under Andy Burnham and John Healey. The response was the same playbook as the last two autumns: NatWest announced £20bn of lending in the north, and a cluster of investment pledges arrived inside 48 hours, none of them about tax. If you own a bank share, the risk is not the levy itself. It is the deflection failing. Read the full story →

The Week Ahead

• Tuesday 11 August, 9.30am BST — ONS labour market transformation update. A progress report on how the ONS is rebuilding its labour market statistics. Dry on the face of it, and worth a glance in a week when 4.9% is doing a great deal of work.
• Thursday 13 August, 7.00am BST — GDP first quarterly estimate, April to June. The quarter in full, and the number the Budget arithmetic will be built on. It arrives before the market opens.
• Thursday 13 August, 7.00am BST — Index of Production, Index of Services, construction output and UK trade. All in the same 7am slot as GDP. If the headline surprises anyone, the explanation is in these.

The Toolbox

One tool from the site each issue, picked to fit what has just happened. Free, no sign-up, and it shows its workings.

Capital gains tax calculator

"Taking the cash in a takeover is a decision with a tax bill attached, and most people work that out afterwards."

The Close

Eleven firms worth more than £1bn have left London this year; seven new listings have raised £557m between them. Set that against a Friday close that put the FTSE 250 at its highest in twelve months and you have the week in one line — the indices are rising while the market underneath them shrinks. Thursday brings the second quarter's growth figure. The question is whether an economy that cut jobs for a 22nd month grew at all.

If something here is wrong, or there is something you want dug into, just reply. It comes straight to me.

MJB