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Showing posts from November, 2025

Post Budget:

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Post Budget thoughts. What are my Opinons? Headline measures:   Tax yield to increase by £26.6bn a year by 2031. Heavily back ended budget, £9bn by 2031, short term plan for the futyre.  £22bn of headroom Reduce energy cost in 2026 by removal of levies (disinflationary) Per-mile charge for EVs (£1.8bn) Increased gambling duty (£1.1bn) Cap of salary sacrifice at £2k (£4.7bn) Increase tax on dividends & property returns (£2bn) Freeze of income tax thresholds (£23bn) Mansion tax – surcharge on valuable homes Increase in NLW (£12.71 but the Real living wage foundation said that it should be around £13.60) Removal of 2-child cap to child benefit for those on UC Corp tax capped at 25% with minor changes to increase tax yield (£1bn). Accounting to prevent anti-avoidance Many of these forecasts the OBR dont know that these are going to be good for raising revenue.  Single working parent: Rented accomodation/min wage earner Helped by increase to NML -> increased ...

Pre Budget thoughts. What I expect and what are my Opinons?

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What will Reeve's be doing on Wednesday? I think a logical way of approaching this would be to understand what the current state of the economy looks like and the opportunities and threats that Reeves faces. So what better way is there to judge than by doing a swot analysis of the UK economy? It'll be some nice interview prep too lol. I'll probably start off with some key indicators such as her black hole deficit and potentially may move onto some niche areas. THIS IS UNFINISHED IM SORRY- It took way longer than expected to write this, currently spent like 3 hours. Strengths: Nov 2025 PMI at 50.2 suggests slight expansion. OBR fiscal projections unexpectedly improved in recent weeks, reducing the expected scale of tax rises from £30-40bn → about £20bn . Households still hold unusually high savings from the COVID period, which can support consumption if confidence stabilises. Ik Mr Lay wouldnt really think this matters but despite volatility, the FTSE remains historically hi...

The 2025 Economics Nobel Prize

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  The 2025 Nobel prize for econonmics has been awarded to three indaviduals, Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt and Joel Mokyr, who have, over decades, attempted to explain humanity's unprecedented progress over the past two centuries. There work not only is incredibly relevant to the current AI technological replacement of labour but extremely relevant to the Y13 micro course, especially with some of the content that we are covering in class at the moment. What enabled technological to compound on itself so rapidly? Pre-industrial period, there was alot of knowledge on HOW things work, how to produce steel and other products, but not WHY. This was more of a trial and error approach, and hence why investment in technologies was quite low. Advancements were made in terms of the "HOW?" Innovation and the impact on economic growth? Economic policy such as the through patents improved growth as innovators are somewhat protected In the past, creative destruction may not have been s...

Insight day at Frontier Economics.

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  As someone who wants to be an Economist, the insight day as Frontier was the one of the closest things I've done thats similar to what I hope to be doing in a few years time. This was a really well organized insight day programme where we learned about the structure of an economics consultancy firm and even learned some really interesting theory from Y2 micro that we havnt covered in class yet and small bits of Y1 uni content such as differences in differences curves, and a quick look at cost-benefit analysis. It was really encouraging to see that there were also so many people working at the firm that were very passionate about economics and I really felt like I had found my people.  Quick summary of what we did: Introduction to Frontier and an overview of the different teams and projects they work on.  Workshops on real-world economic problems where we worked in small groups to analyse data and make recommendations.  Case study session that involved applying econ...

What's in a U?

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 (Unfinished- will try getting it done by next week but here are the notes I took:) What’s in a u? Expected utility theory is a foundational model in economics for how people make decisions under uncertainty (when outcomes are risky). classical view risk aversion comes from a place of finishing marginal utility. 1 million sure for sure is better than a 50/50 for 2 million or 0. The utility to buy what we have with the million is better than what we can with the second million decision theorist Yaari- horses of different colours. How to measure risks treat utility as a yardstick and compare such that it can be traded with money/commodity. marginal rate of substitution curvature or u star cara transformation why do billionaires buy insurrance? time random lottery, you don’t know when you are going to be paid   relating economics and psychology:   economics use choice based basis on nearing risk, through mainly the economics domain. Pysocholhy uses surveys through different ...

Anti Trust Law in America.

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Anti Trust in America. FTC lawsuit against Amazon for abusing monopoly power. Huge thing for antitrust law. After US civil war, private companies were becoming huge. Large companies called trusts where a couple of small companies combined together: wine trust, barb wire trust, sugar trust...etc Standard oil (around the 1900s)-  John Dean Rockefeller, one of the richest people on the planet. Many court copies of the cases were gone, Rockefeller had huge power. Something dark to his story: a small group of railroads got together with oil refiners, essentially colluding. He conquered industry by using the railroad power. Standard oil had unfair competitive power. 24/38 refineries were bought just by Rockefeller. He owned so much of the industry, he could just set prices. Rosavel saw this and files a lawsuit. Restraint of trade, sheer size of standard oil made it great but needed to be split up. They broke up but these companies were broken up but still co-operating with eachother...