Noise Cancelling with Neil Woodford

Does the UK need £35bn of tax rises at the 2026 Budget? The IFS Green Budget says Chancellor John Healey is £35bn short ahead of his first Budget on 28 October. Neil Woodford says the number rests on an interest rate nobody actually forecasts.

The Office for Budget Responsibility builds its own forecasts for UK growth, wages and inflation. For interest rates, it takes whatever the bond market happens to be pricing. Jon Adair explains what is really inside a market interest rate, why that price is not the same thing as a forecast, and the place in the IFS report where two different interest rate paths sit side by side.

Neil then puts his own numbers on UK growth, inflation, the Bank of England base rate and 10-year gilt yields, and explains why he thinks the OBR, the Bank of England, the IMF and the OECD keep getting the UK economy wrong. Jon puts the hard cases to him: oil above $100 with the Strait of Hormuz still shut, and whether the gilt market would punish a Chancellor who didn't raise taxes.

Then what it means for investors: which parts of the UK economy and the UK stock market Neil thinks gain most if he's right, and the one number to check on Budget day before you look at any tax rise.

This video is for information only and is not investment advice.

Stamp duty on a typical UK house move has roughly doubled in 20 years without a single rate rise, and the number of homeowners moving house with a mortgage has more than halved.

The government's new Your First Home scheme is aimed at first-time buyers. Neil Woodford and Jon Adair show why first-time buyers are the part of the housing market that is working, how frozen stamp duty thresholds and post-crisis deposit rules have stopped existing homeowners moving, and why £1 of stamp duty can cost a family £5 of house. Neil sets out what he would do, whether it would pay for itself, what would prove him wrong, and what it all means for housebuilders and the businesses that depend on people moving.

Neil's full analysis

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This episode is for information and education only. It is not investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. Capital is at risk.

UK gilt yields fell on the day Britain found out it had borrowed £3.5bn more than planned. So what is really setting the cost of UK government borrowing?

Neil Woodford and Jon Adair look past the "Truss moment" headlines at what gilt investors are actually pricing: inflation, the oil price and the war in the Gulf. Neil revisits his April call that the Iran war was already over and says what he got wrong. They also cover why UK diesel is heading for £2 a litre, what's behind the fuel shortages in France, and what a settlement in the Gulf would mean for UK inflation, interest rates and the stock market.

Will AI take your job? Anthropic's economic scenarios model says AI could make the US economy 30% bigger by 2030 and put 1 in 5 knowledge workers out of work. Neil Woodford runs the model live and shows who gets the money when AI does the work.

In this episode of The Noise Cancelling Podcast, Jon Adair and Neil Woodford break down Anthropic's 2030 AI economy forecast: three scenarios for AI and the economy, what happens to wages and unemployment, why the labour share falls from 60p to 45p in the pound, and what it means for investors, graduates, the UK economy and anyone in knowledge work.

UK inflation is falling while oil is up 35% and gilt yields are at an 18-year high. Neil Woodford explains why the 4-5% inflation forecasts are wrong again, what is actually in the CPI basket, and why the bond market may be pricing the wrong story.

The Telegraph says British inflation hits 4-5% by Christmas. The Bank of England, the City and the academic economists said the same thing in March, when oil was $120. July came in at 2.9%, food inflation at 1.3%. In this episode Jon Adair argues the inflation surge case as hard as he can and Neil Woodford takes it apart leg by leg: the energy shock and the price cap, food, second-round effects and wages, and the bond market.

Neil puts a number on December inflation and explains why most of it is already written. He covers why gas and electricity are 3% of the basket (half what they were in the 1980s), why 55% of the pump price is tax, why UK pay growth at a six-year low means there is no wage spiral, and why the gilt market is following US Treasury yields rather than a UK inflation problem. Then the bigger question: is this a new inflationary age, or the start of a period of disinflation driven by energy supply, China and AI? And if he's wrong, what happens.