Two week warning 🚨

Happy Monday. Two week warning. With the Premier League starting on 15th August (a week on Friday), this is the week to rally the office for the company fantasy football league. Accountants and statisticians with no interest in the sport itself tend to perform particularly well.

Bonus points as always for the best team names, but you can’t copy one you’ve read somewhere else and teapot related puns take priority.

MARKETS

Data: Google Finance, 5-day Market Close

Notable UK earnings this week: BP (BP.), Glencore (GLEN), Legal & General (LGEN), Deliveroo (ROO).

Notable US earnings this week: Eli Lilly (LLY), Palantir Technologies (PLTR), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), McDonalds (MCD), Walt Disney (DIS), Uber (UBER).

📈📉

PROJECT WATCH

🌊 Holyhead grid upgrade begins construction ahead of Morlais tidal energy. Read more

⚡ Contractors named for £8bn of National Grid substation work. Read more

🛫 Heathrow submits £49bn expansion plan. Read more

BUSINESS & FINANCE

Interest rate cut expected this week
the Bank of England looks set to cool things down—again—by slashing interest rates this Thursday. The expected 0.25 percentage point cut would bring the rate to 4%, back to where we were in that innocent pre-Trumpian era of March 2023. That’s five cuts since last August—almost as many as the average Premier League manager faces in a season.

Markets seem more certain about this than they are the weather, with odds of a rate drop priced in at over 80%. Another trim could follow before the end of the year, just in time for your Christmas turkey and maybe even a half-smile from your mortgage provider. Chancellor Rachel Reeves will be quietly fist-bumping under the Cabinet table, as cheaper borrowing could be the sprig of holly in the rather bare pudding that is the UK economy right now.

But don’t dust off your confetti just yet. The British economy shrank a gloomy 0.1% in May and 0.3% in April, thanks to a cocktail of imported misery—Trump’s tit-for-tat tariffs and good old-fashioned homegrown business tax increases. And no amount of Yorkshire tea can mask the fact that unemployment’s popped up to 4.7%, the highest since June 2021, back when we still thought banana bread was a personality trait.

Laughing all the way to at the bank
If you were hoping for a payday from that dodgy car finance deal back in 2017, don’t fire up the celebratory engine just yet. The Supreme Court’s just handed a tidy win to the banks, reversing a previous ruling that could have cost lenders billions and left Britain’s car parks looking like M&S returns queues on Boxing Day.

Yes, some motorist claims were tied to “secret” commissions paid to dealers by finance companies - brokers in all but name - that hadn’t exactly been shouted from the rooftops. But the UK's highest court says that, actually, no, it’s not dodgy if car dealers act in their own (read: profit-making) interests. Shocker. Ultimately, a car dealer could refer you to their finance friends at a higher interest rate than you should get elsewhere for the same loan on a car - and they would get a cut for you taking the higher rate.

With a few billion saved, no wonder they might be able to find a quarter of a percent for the rest of us! Silver lining is there may be fewer adverts on the radio now.

POLITICS

Clickbait & channel crossings
In a move to shut down the TikTok-trafficking trade, our home sec, Yvette Cooper, is attempting to silence the smugglers. A new offence is brewing for those advertising illegal Channel crossings, with up to five years for digital dodginess.

With record arrivals this year and a backlog bursting at the seams, Labour’s trying a little fast-tracked moral fibre, as protests continue to simmer outside asylum hotels.

Freedom of speech or freedom to flog?
It’s been a week since the UK’s Online Safety Act came in, and across the pond, Republican senator and Trump chum Scott Fitzgerald is suggesting a Silicon Valley squad-up against it.

The claim? That the UK and EU’s attempts at online regulation are stifling free speech. Some in the US see any regulation as a free speech ice bucket. Expect more transatlantic tea-spilling ahead.

Wealthy woes & taxing times
Lord Kinnock has resurrected that perennial political ghost: the wealth tax. With Labour murmuring about "broadest shoulders bearing the load", and Rachel Reeves non-committal at best, whispers of a 2% levy on the ultra-rich have the Bentley class nervously revving their engines.

The UK has flirted with the idea since the '70s but never quite sealed the deal. Across Europe, wealth taxes are a mixed bag - Spain’s driven its millionaires out, Switzerland’s embraced the art of slow-and-steady taxing. The UK might just be eyeing the pot for a post-austerity top-up.

Sponsored

Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.

Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.

Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.

Download the free guide

ACROSS THE POND

Chips ahoy for Tesla with Samsung deal
Elon Musk has pulled the proverbial rabbit out of his hat again, with Tesla signing a staggering $16.5 billion deal with Samsung Electronics for Tesla’s AI6 chips. However, despite this hefty spend, it's unlikely to get those robotaxis rolling out any faster. Samsung's spanking new chip factory in Taylor, Texas is set to benefit, re-energising a project that’s been dragging like a British summer without an umbrella.

Samsung’s shares took a hefty bounce upwards by 6.8% on Monday, as investors cheered the potential leap it could make in the AI chip race. Still, with production not peeking around the corner for a few years yet, Tesla's immediate hurdles, like the bumpy EV sales tour, remain intact.

Musk was quick to enlighten his followers on social media platform X, describing how he could personally oversee the chip production at the fab, conveniently located a stone's throw from his Texan abode.

You’re fired!
In yet another episode of Washington's drama series, US President Donald Trump has shown the door to Erika McEntarfer, the now-former commission of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Her sin? Revealing job figures that failed to paint him as hero-in-chief. Trump as the leader of the free world naturally took to social media to accuse McEntarfer of "RIGGING" numbers to make him look bad.

The sweet sound of democracy. July's disappointing addition of just 73,000 jobs should have stayed a minor nightmare for the economists. However, Trump added melodrama by aggressively pursuing tariff plans and politicising jobs data. After weakening markets with his tariff antics, Trump’s hasty axing of McEntarfer has sparked international whispers about his authoritarian streak.

TECH

Stage fright or stage light?
In a move that Shakespeare might call “most foul, strange and unnatural”, China’s humanoid robot, Xueba 01, has been accepted into a PhD programme in Drama and Film.

With a silicone face, expressive eyebrows, this mechanical method actor will study traditional Chinese opera at Shanghai Theatre Academy. He’s already mimicking Mei Lanfang’s iconic “orchid fingers” and cracking jokes about being deleted if he flunks.

Refuelling the future, another China first
In space, China has pulled off the first in-orbit satellite refuel. Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 performed a high-stakes extra-terrestrial tango 35,000km above Earth.

The satellites “visually merged”, raising eyebrows and orbital ambitions alike. It’s a game-changer, one that could extend spacecraft lifespans and fuel future Mars missions.

Mapping minds & Machinations
Google’s new Gemini 2.5 "Deep Think" AI is redefining brainpower, think a Socrates search engine smackdown: Gemini 2.5 launches a panel of AI minds across disciplines and lets them duke it out for the smartest take.

Google also launched AlphaEarth Foundations, a planetary AI that digests satellite data and spits out hyper-precise maps of Earth’s land and water. It uses satellite images, radar, 3D laser mapping, climate simulations, and more, and then weaves all this information together in sharp, 10x10-metre squares. It’s helping track Amazon deforestation, Antarctic ice and, presumably, the last patch of unclaimed Wi-Fi.

Robotaxis are rolling in: Uber’s shelling out $300M to electrify its robo-ride-hailing fleet with Lucid’s luxury SUVs, while Tesla’s expanding its driverless service from Austin, Texas, to the handful of other quiet cabby companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

‘90s are back, baby! America welcomed its oldest-ever baby, Thaddeus, born from an embryo frozen since 1994. His biological sister is 30, his adoptive parents were in nappies when the embryo was conceived, and the embryo itself is old enough to remember Friends Season 1. Truly, the circle of life and cryogenic storage continues.

WORLD

Quakes, krakens & Krasheninnikov
A volcano that’s been on mute since Henry VIII was still in short trousers decides to erupt. Krasheninnikov in Kamchatka has blown its top for the first time in 600 years - just days after an 8.8-magnitude earthquake rattled Russia’s far east.

Seismologists suggest it’s no coincidence: tectonic tension may have popped the cork. Tsunami sirens sang briefly across the Pacific, and neighbouring volcano Klyuchevskoi also chimed in.

Population panic, playground payday
Over in Beijing, it’s less magma, more mama baba. With a birth rate dropping faster than your nan’s soufflé, China is now offering cash incentives for each child under three - up to £1,200 a year, retroactive no less.

Some cities are throwing in six-figure baby bonuses for families with three little ones. But it’s not all nappies and red notes. Beijing’s also promoting free preschool plans, but for now, it seems China’s baby boom needs more boom, progeny requires both passion and a payment plan.

Mega dams & micro dissent
Not content with reshaping its people, China’s also reshaping the planet. Enter: the world’s biggest hydropower dam, now under construction in Tibet. Seventy-four years in the making, the Yarlung Tsangpo project promises three times the juice of the Three Gorges Dam. But it's not just about watts and water; it sits uncomfortably close to the disputed India-China border, prompting geopolitical jitters.

In Hong Kong, 19-year-old Lau Pun-hei, a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was convicted for insulting the Chinese national anthem by turning his back during its performance at a 2026 World Cup Asian qualifier match against Iran last June, at Hong Kong Stadium. Under the National Anthem Ordinance, enacted in 2020, dissing the "March of the Volunteers" can lead to penalties of up to three years behind bars. Lau’s sentencing is scheduled for August 13th.

There’s still tea in the pot...
The Teapot weekly quiz