“Tax Cut U-Turn…”

It represents a major and humiliating U-turn for new Prime Minister Liz Truss, who was insisting as recently as Sunday she was “absolutely committed” to the cut.

UK’s Truss forced into U-turn on tax after week of market turmoil

Prime Minister Liz Truss was forced on Monday into a humiliating U-turn after less than a month in power, reversing a cut to the highest rate of income tax that helped spark turmoil in financial markets and a rebellion in her party.

Finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng said the decision to scrap the top rate tax cut had been taken with “some humility and contrition”, after his party’s lawmakers reacted with alarm to a move that favoured the rich during an economic downturn.

Elected by party members but not the broader public, Truss and Kwarteng had sought to jolt the economy out of its more than 10-year run of stagnant growth with a 1980s-style plan to cut taxes and regulation, all funded by vast government borrowing.

Signalling a break with “Treasury orthodoxy”, they had also fired the most senior official in the government’s finance department and released the tax cut plan without accompanying forecasts on how much it would cost.

Investors – used to Britain being a pillar of the global financial community – were aghast. They sold British assets at such a rate that the pound hit a record low against the dollar and the cost of government borrowing soared, forcing the Bank of England to intervene to shore up markets.

While the removal of the top rate of tax only made up around 2 billion out of the 45 billion pounds of unfunded tax cuts, it was the most divisive element of a package that also stumped up tens of billions of pounds to subsidise energy costs.

Musk reverses course, again: he’s ready to buy Twitter, build ‘X’ app

Billionaire Elon Musk is proposing to proceed with his original $44 billion bid to take Twitter Inc TWTR.N private, security filings showed on Tuesday, calling for an end to a lawsuit by the social media company that could have forced him to pay up, whether he wanted to or not.

An agreement would put the world’s richest person in charge of one of the most influential media platforms and end months of litigation that damaged Twitter’s brand and fed Musk’s reputation for erratic behavior.

Musk, the chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Inc TSLA.O, will take over a company he originally committed to buying in April, but soon soured on. Late on Tuesday he tweeted that buying Twitter would speed up his ambition to create an “everything app” called X.

The renewed offer comes ahead of a highly anticipated face-off between Musk and Twitter in Delaware’s Court of Chancery on Oct. 17, in which the social media company was set to seek an order directing Musk to close the deal for $44 billion.

Q4 off to shaky start as stocks stumble, but oil jumps

The final quarter of the year got off to a shaky start on Monday, with world stocks languishing at their lowest levels since late 2020 – when the global economy was still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Oil prices jumped more than 4% as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, a group known as OPEC+, said it would consider reducing output, while sterling rallied after the UK government said it would reverse a controversial tax cut that had rocked British markets.

Oil prices rallied on reports what OPEC+ will this week consider cutting output by more than 1 million barrels a day, for its biggest reduction since the pandemic, in a bid to support the market.

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