The splintered National Assembly will vote on the Social Security budget on Tuesday, December 9th. There is a slender chance that the budget can pass with a hotch-potch majority assembled from the quarrelsome Centre, the divided Centre-Right and the wary Socialists. If so, Lecornu's experiment in parliamentary democracy allowing the National Assembly to control the most important French budget-making for decades will have achieved its first important success.
Post-Budget, gilt markets seem reasonably quiet though we have seen a slight tick-up in yields this morning after declining yesterday. Sterling trades at its best in a month against the dollar, though has come back off the overnight highs this morning to $1.3223. EURGBP has seen less of a move as it ran up against the 50-day SMA support, a three-week high for the pound.
The top 1% of taxpayers are responsible for around a third of the total paid in Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax (CGT), new data from Wealth Club, the UK's largest non-advisory investment service for tax-efficient and private market investments, shows. Its Freedom of Information request to HMRC found 500,000 individuals paid £93.828 billion in income tax and CGT in the 2023/24 tax year equivalent to 33% of the total £288.5 billion raised.
One scenario is that growth continues more or less as it has for the last 20 years. If so, the current federal fiscal trajectory is unsustainable,
