Liz Truss has admitted that the tax cuts in her mini-Budget “disproportionately” benefit the wealthy – but insisted they were the “right plan” and sought to blame Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the recent days of market turmoil.
Breaking days of silence as the markets roiled, the prime minister’s comments came as she was accused by former Bank of England governor Sir Mark Carney of “undercutting economic institutions” and “working at some cross-purposes” with the bank, after it was forced to make an emergency intervention in the gilt market on Wednesday to prevent a crisis in the UK’s major pension funds.
The bank’s intervention – to spend billions on 30-year UK government bonds – buoyed Sterling with its largest leap since mid-June, but its value had again fallen by 1 per cent to $1.0775 on Thursday morning and the dollar clawed back a recent dip.
The FTSE 100 index also lost 2 per cent of its value as Ms Truss was interviewed by BBC local radio stations, but began to recover as the hour came to a close, since recouping nearly half of those losses.
