As no one else seems to want to help you, here you go. Apologies for any dodgy pasting.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Britain is on the cusp of an economic boom – no thanks to Labour
The UK’s private economy has an extremely healthy balance sheet. But it must fully embrace AI
Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer
Labour may benefit from cyclical and global economic forces beyond its controlCredit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
International Business Editor
28 January 2026 7:00am GMT
The British economy is in the early stages of a powerful cyclical recovery, and perhaps the highest growth rates for a generation.
It portends a virtuous circle for the UK’s public finances, and is likely to reshape the political landscape beyond recognition over the next three years.
As we enter 2026, the country is sitting on the coiled springs of a pent-up credit boom.
This has little to do with Government policies, though Labour may be the beneficiary of cyclical and global forces beyond its control – unless the self-indulgent malcontents on its backbenches squander their good luck by inflicting another gothic horror show on an exasperated nation.
The private sector has been through a debt deleveraging equal to 100pc of GDP since the peak in 2008. Households have paid down £600bn of mortgage debt, their debt-to-income ratio has dropped from 165pc to 121pc.
Companies have retrenched in lockstep. Total private debt has dropped from 185pc to 132pc of GDP. The turn-around is astonishing.
You can view this debt repayment as a sign of past weakness – or a logical response to the Bank of England’s monetary squeeze – but the outcome is that the private UK economy now has an extremely healthy balance sheet.
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The cleansing dwarfs the rise in public debt, which makes you wonder whether the reaction to the Truss mini-Budget in 2022 was really a case of market infantilism.
Data from the Bank for International Settlements show that the UK is today one of the least indebted countries in the developed world.
For the record, the total debt-to-GDP levels are: Japan (377), France (324), Canada (309), Netherlands (303), China (294), Switzerland (277), Belgium (275), Sweden (270), US (247), Italy (234), UK (219), and Germany (197).
David Owen, from Saltmarsh Economics, says the media narrative of bankrupt Britain has been a travesty.
“People just wrote us off. Now the stars are aligned and I think the UK can easily surprise on the upside, with growth of 2-3pc down the line,” he said.
Capital Economics expects inflation to drop to 2pc by April, clearing the way for a cut in interest rates to 3pc this year.
A global supply glut is driving down the cost of oil and gas and amounts to a large net income transfer back to fossil-importing states, the mirror image of what happened at the outset of the Ukraine war.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Britain is on the cusp of an economic boom – no thanks to Labour
The UK’s private economy has an extremely healthy balance sheet. But it must fully embrace AI
Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer
Labour may benefit from cyclical and global economic forces beyond its controlCredit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
International Business Editor
28 January 2026 7:00am GMT
The British economy is in the early stages of a powerful cyclical recovery, and perhaps the highest growth rates for a generation.
It portends a virtuous circle for the UK’s public finances, and is likely to reshape the political landscape beyond recognition over the next three years.
As we enter 2026, the country is sitting on the coiled springs of a pent-up credit boom.
This has little to do with Government policies, though Labour may be the beneficiary of cyclical and global forces beyond its control – unless the self-indulgent malcontents on its backbenches squander their good luck by inflicting another gothic horror show on an exasperated nation.
The private sector has been through a debt deleveraging equal to 100pc of GDP since the peak in 2008. Households have paid down £600bn of mortgage debt, their debt-to-income ratio has dropped from 165pc to 121pc.
Companies have retrenched in lockstep. Total private debt has dropped from 185pc to 132pc of GDP. The turn-around is astonishing.
You can view this debt repayment as a sign of past weakness – or a logical response to the Bank of England’s monetary squeeze – but the outcome is that the private UK economy now has an extremely healthy balance sheet.
Advertisement
The cleansing dwarfs the rise in public debt, which makes you wonder whether the reaction to the Truss mini-Budget in 2022 was really a case of market infantilism.
Data from the Bank for International Settlements show that the UK is today one of the least indebted countries in the developed world.
For the record, the total debt-to-GDP levels are: Japan (377), France (324), Canada (309), Netherlands (303), China (294), Switzerland (277), Belgium (275), Sweden (270), US (247), Italy (234), UK (219), and Germany (197).
David Owen, from Saltmarsh Economics, says the media narrative of bankrupt Britain has been a travesty.
“People just wrote us off. Now the stars are aligned and I think the UK can easily surprise on the upside, with growth of 2-3pc down the line,” he said.
Capital Economics expects inflation to drop to 2pc by April, clearing the way for a cut in interest rates to 3pc this year.
A global supply glut is driving down the cost of oil and gas and amounts to a large net income transfer back to fossil-importing states, the mirror image of what happened at the outset of the Ukraine war.
Advertisement
The International Energy Agency expects anaemic demand to soak up just a third of the 5.6 million barrels a day of extra crude hitting a saturated market over 2025 and 2026. Brent prices have fallen towards the bottom of their historical range in real terms.
Spot gas prices have spiked because of Europe’s winter freeze, but long-term TTF contracts have barely moved. Contracts for winter of 2027 are trading at under €25MWh, a drop of more than 90pc from the wild levels four years ago. Britain’s energy crisis is yesterday’s story.
German Keynesian rearmament and infrastructure spending are starting to feed through to both European and British defence industries, helping to lift Greater Europe out of its semi-eternal slump.
The US is heading for a pre-electoral economic blow-off. Fiscal policy is swinging from a net contraction of 1pc of GDP in 2025 to a net expansion of 1pc of GDP this year as front-loaded stimulus from the “one big beautiful bill” hits an economy already on fire.
Far from taking away the punch bowl, the Federal Reserve is adding more rocket fuel by cutting rates and injecting an extra shot of market liquidity by relaunching bond purchases of $40bn (£29.1bn) a month.
productivity shock in the US, where the Atlanta Fed’s GDP snapshot is tracking a growth rate of 5.4pc – even though the jobs market has slowed to a crawl.
The US is a few quarters ahead of Britain in AI investment and diffusion. It has already been through the downward leg and the trough of the AI J-curve. It is now on the fast-accelerating upward leg.
The AI J-Curve is a term coined by Prof Erik Brynjolfsson, head of Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. Productivity dips before it rises. Companies have to reconfigure their systems, retrain workers and invest large sums before they see any return.
productive forces of the country to pay for runaway benefits and the thought-crime apparatus.
But on AI at least, it is hard to fault the overall strategy of this Government. Nor do I fault Labour’s plan to raise public investment to 2.6pc of GDP. That at least is better than the self-defeating starvation of core infrastructure that has blighted this country for so long.
It is going too far to suggest that the British economy is entering a perfect positive storm but those running down this country, almost by force of habit, may be in for a big surprise.
It is time for investors to go “long Britain