When the Bank of England raises interest rates by 0.5 per cent to 1.75 per cent, the biggest hike in 27 years, warns that it expects inflation to hit 13.3 per cent in October and that a recession will set in during the last quarter of this year and endure for all of next year, and the pound responds to this support by tumbling 0.4 per cent, such a combination of adverse circumstances surely qualifies as a bad day at the office.
British business is understandably worried and many SMEs are frantic. As at the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, emergency measures are needed to prevent the collapse of enterprises, but nobody expects our current stopgap chancellor Nadhim Zahawi to be the agent of recovery. That challenge will become the responsibility of one of the two Conservative leadership contenders, Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, and, although no prediction in politics is completely safe, it very much looks like being the latter.
