Matthew Lynn

Who’s going to miss WH Smith?

28 March 2025 11:16 pm

WH Smith is opting for the oldest trick in the corporate playbook. It is changing its name. It might have…

If Bailey won’t call for radical growth reforms, no one will

25 March 2025 11:25 pm

It was hardly the message Chancellor Rachel Reeves would have been looking for a day before a Spring Statement which…

Is the Trump Slump over?

25 March 2025 3:58 am

Tariffs would destroy supply chains and drive up inflation. Elon Musk’s savage cuts would bring the government machine grinding to…

The flaw in Labour’s plan to fix potholes

24 March 2025 9:39 pm

Ahead of last summer’s election, the Labour party made lots of grand promises about how it was going to fix…

China’s BYD could kill Tesla

19 March 2025 8:27 pm

Tesla and its hyper-active boss Elon Musk are having a bad month. On both sides of the Altantic, there have…

It’s impossible to make Scottish politicians financially literate

18 March 2025 12:08 am

Even the OECD has finally noticed. The Paris-based policy forum is normally always in favour of higher taxes and more…

It’s been a poor five years from Andrew Bailey

16 March 2025 10:09 pm

The pound has not collapsed. You can still trade shares, bonds and currencies in the City of London. And inflation,…

Why John Lewis’s profits have soared

14 March 2025 12:19 am

Growth has ground to a halt, manufacturing is collapsing, and the government is desperately scratching around for ways to save…

Trump’s Tesla stunt won’t help Musk

12 March 2025 8:57 pm

Tesla’s share price has halved, sales have slumped, boycotts are being organised and Chinese rivals are ready to steal the…

Does Trump want a stock market crash?

11 March 2025 9:38 pm

There ‘could be a recession’, said President Trump over the weekend with the kind of nonchalant shrug that suggested he…

Europe could pay the price for Germany’s debt shake-up

5 March 2025 9:37 pm

Germany has finally decided to join the party – but Europe may come to regret it. After two decades of…

The fatal flaws in Trump’s crypto reserve plan

3 March 2025 9:31 pm

President Trump was very bullish about his decision over the weekend to create a ‘crypto reserve’. It will legitimise crypto…

Will Labour MPs scupper a US-UK trade deal?

28 February 2025 11:33 pm

A UK-US trade deal is on the table. On a surprisingly successful trip to Washington, US President Donald Trump made…

Will Trump’s ‘golden visas’ threaten Rachel Reeves’s tax plans?

26 February 2025 9:46 pm

Fed up with Rachel Reeves’s tax rises, with the calls for wealth and mansion taxes, and the loss of non-dom…

Trump is doing us a favour by targeting our dreadful tech laws

26 February 2025 12:33 am

It will be an unacceptable intrusion on our sovereignty. And it will pave the way for American domination of the…

How France killed its start-up culture

23 February 2025 4:30 pm

It would encourage digitally savvy entrepreneurs. It would be a hub for artificial intelligence. And it would encourage a wave…

Is X still worth £38 billion? Elon Musk thinks so

20 February 2025 12:32 am

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, his many critics gleefully predicted a catastrophe. We were told that everyone would…

Does it matter if Rachel Reeves fibbed on her CV?

19 February 2025 4:31 pm

Rachel Reeves is in the headlines again, for all the wrong reasons. The Chancellor’s entry in Who’s Who lists her…

Does Rachel Reeves’s industrial strategy even exist?

13 February 2025 9:50 pm

The Labour government was pinning everything on an ambitious industrial strategy to boost growth. It was meant to make the…

Cheaper mortgages won’t save Britain from recession

12 February 2025 9:19 pm

Electricity bills are going up. Netflix is adding a couple of pounds a month to the price of a standard…

Vance is right, Europe is smothering AI

12 February 2025 1:51 am

They won’t have liked the message or the messenger. With characteristic bluntness, the American vice president J. D. Vance tore…

Starmer should split from the EU if it hits back at Trump on tariffs

11 February 2025 9:44 pm

The European Union has hit back against Donald Trump’s decision to impose 25 per cent tariffs on steel imports. “Tariffs…

Trump’s tariffs could kill Europe’s steel industry

10 February 2025 9:42 pm

So, it seems that Donald Trump wasn’t bluffing after all. On his way to the Superbowl, the president made time…

What Trump’s tariff ‘opening salvo’ will teach him

5 February 2025 12:29 am

Mexico and Canada have been given a last-minute reprieve from Donald Trump’s tariffs. China has offered only the most half-hearted…

Europe can’t win a trade war against the US

3 February 2025 9:14 pm

It will hit back immediately. It will target the industries that will hurt the most. And it won’t be bullied…