Good morning, it's Paul here with the SCVR for Wednesday.
Estimated timing - the main report needs to be up by noon. Then I'll add some more stuff mid-afternoon later, after the Chancellor's statement. Today's report is now finished.
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Summer Statement from Rishi Sunak
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is scheduled to announce a mini budget today. It's being broadcast live on the BBC Parliament channel, from 12:35, after Prime Ministers Questions.
Unfortunately that clashes with a company Zoom meeting I have from noon onwards, so will have to do that thing of having two screens on at the same time, and leave it to my system 1 brain to ensure that I focus on the most important thing, which seems to be triggered by key words of interest when multi-tasking.
As usual, it's been widely leaked to the press, which are suggesting these main measures;
Stamp Duty holiday - said to be effective immediately, and exempting residential property transactions from Stamp Duty for the first £500k, and possibly a reduced rate above that. Speculation is this would be for 6-12 months. The purpose is obvious, and very necessary - to kick-start housing sales, which have dropped considerably. The wider benefit to the economy is that people often spend on home improvements when they move house. I think this is an excellent idea, and it's something we've discussed here before as being a step which would boost the housing market.
Shares which might benefit from this? Housebuilders, estate agents (I like Foxtons (LON:FOXT) for recovery purposes, and it has refinanced already). It might give a lift to DIY-related companies, possibly?
Kickstart jobs scheme - this is apparently a new scheme to pay the wages of 16-24 year olds claiming Universal Credit. This new scheme sounds a much better idea than the furlough scheme, which just pays people to be idle, only deferring a lot of redundancies & slowing down the re-opening of the economy. All at vast cost.
Shares which might benefit from this jobs scheme? Obvious ones are hospitality sector, and retail, which both employ a lot of young people. We'll have to scrutinise the detail, to see how it would work. Could this scheme have an unintended consequence of encouraging companies to make furloughed staff redundant, then re-employ them at the Govt's expense, once they start claiming Universal Credit, and hence become…
