Matthew Burrows

London is paying for being expensive, and Zoopla says stamp duty is part of the bill. Some 85% of homes in London and the south east have lost value over the past year, Zoopla figures show, against 35% across the UK as a whole. The average London home has lost £5,400. In the north west, the typical home has gained £6,600. Zoopla puts the slide down to higher mortgage costs and weaker buyer demand since the Iran war began. It also argues that because London homes cost more, stamp duty takes a bigger slice of every purchase, which pushes sellers to lower their prices to keep deals moving. Its suggested fix is extending the 2% stamp duty rate band, which it estimates could save home movers up to £7,500 and first time buyers up to £6,000. For owners who stay put, the drop is a paper loss. For anyone who needs to move, it eats into the money they'd built up in their home and were counting on for the next purchase. The north west is going up in the world. London is marking down its price tags.

Buying on a record high day has beaten buying on an ordinary day over one, three and five years. Sitting on cash waiting for a bargain has been the pricier habit. Vanguard data covering 1950 to 2025 shows money put in on a record high day returned 9.5% a year later on average, against 9.2% for any other day. Over three years it was 30.2% against 28.5%, and over five years 55.8% against 51.9%. Over 10 and 20 years record high buyers did lag, a fair warning against putting one big lump in at a peak and never adding to it. The S&P 500 set a new high on 15 April and has gained more than 10% since, without a single 5% pullback. A saver who kept £5,000 in cash from mid April waiting for that dip would have missed a gain worth over £500. David Dierking's answer is a fixed amount each month, so no single day decides the outcome. A dip may still come. Markets rarely send a calendar invite.

Crypto firms have spent years outside the US banking system. Ripple now has a federal bank charter of its own. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has given final approval to Ripple National Trust Bank, after Ripple applied in July 2025. The bank will hold the reserves behind RLUSD, Ripple's dollar linked stablecoin, a crypto token built to track the dollar, worth about $2.5bn (~£1.9bn). It is a trust charter, so no everyday deposits and no loans. It covers holding and safeguarding assets for clients, which is the scope Ripple needs. RLUSD itself is still issued by Ripple's New York regulated unit, so state and federal regulators each oversee part of the structure. BNY holds most of the reserves. Chief executive Brad Garlinghouse says Ripple has long argued that crypto and banks work better together. The approval is that idea with a federal stamp on it. The price of the credibility is two layers of rules as well as two regulators.

HSBC missed revenue forecasts by more than $300m and still approved a fresh $1bn share buyback, where the bank buys its own shares back from investors. Third quarter revenue came in at $18.6bn against the $18.9bn analysts had pencilled in. Profit of $9.63bn landed almost exactly on the $9.69bn consensus, which left the board room to keep paying out. Add a dividend of $0.10 a share, a cash payment to shareholders, worth about $1.7bn, and the two could return around $2.7bn to shareholders for the quarter. Banks expect the banking surcharge, an extra tax on banks, to go up by five per cent at the Budget, which would bring in about £2bn a year. A bank that can hand back $2.7bn in one quarter makes a higher bank tax easier to sell to voters. The chancellor has been given a ready made example.

Technology stocks traded at as much as 48 times forward earnings, a measure of expected profits, at the height of the 2000 boom. The sector sits at around 19 times now. Since 1942, bear markets, which are sustained falls in share prices, have averaged a little over 11 months, with an average cumulative loss of 31.7%, based on data from First Trust and Bloomberg. Technology now makes up about 40% of the S&P 500, an index of 500 big US companies, by weighting, meaning its share of the index's value. If revenue from artificial intelligence grows more slowly than investors expect, that concentration could make any pullback, a fall in prices, sharper. Geoffrey Seiler sets out a bear case in which a 30% fall would leave a $10,000 investment in a fund that follows the S&P 500 worth about $7,000 by the end of 2027.

Meta grew revenue by 26% in the third quarter and is still asking investors for up to $95bn. Sales are booming. The bill for artificial intelligence is growing faster. Revenue reached $64.6bn, but total costs and expenses climbed 68% to $51.6bn. Free cash flow, the cash left after running the business and paying for kit, swung to minus $2.12bn, against a positive $10.63bn a year earlier. Full year capital spending is now guided at $135bn to $145bn, against $130bn before. Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom together could take up to $5bn of the new stock, so the companies selling Meta its chips would be helping to fund the purchases. For ordinary shareholders, each existing share owns a smaller slice of the company unless the AI spending lifts profits enough to make up the difference. Meta isn't short of cash, with $82.45bn in the bank at the end of September. Its spending now outruns the cash its business generates each quarter.

Unemployment among 16 to 24 year olds has passed 16% for the first time in over a decade, and the Budget is reportedly still bringing a 3.9% minimum wage rise. John Healey is reportedly preparing the rise, which would take the National Living Wage for workers over 21 from £12.71 to £13.20 an hour. Younger workers would get the same 3.9%, from £10.85 to £11.27. The Treasury declined to comment on the reports, so for now it is a briefing. The same percentage means a wider gap in pounds: younger workers gain 42p an hour against 49p for adults. Labour's manifesto promised to line the youth rate up with the living wage by 2030, and equal percentage rises mean the youth rate does not catch up. Young workers were promised the adult rate. They are reportedly getting the same percentage rise as everyone else.

Britain's gross debt, the total the government owes, has hit £3tn, and the economy is growing faster than almost anyone forecast. It is still an odd backdrop to the Healey Budget. The Office for National Statistics says debt took six years to move from £2tn to £3tn. The previous trillion took roughly a decade. Growth is on track for nearly 2% this year, yet City forecasters surveyed by the Treasury mostly expect 1.1% to 1.4% next year. Youth unemployment has climbed above 16%, a level not seen in 11 years. After August's data, economists at City firms judged it extremely likely that the average worker would take a real pay cut. Healey can live with an ugly debt chart. Households whose wages are about to buy less are a harder sell.

A false alarm, said India's largest crypto exchange, until it confirmed a real $16m loss and said it would absorb it itself. CoinDCX says it absorbed a loss of 15.99 million USDT, about $16m or £12.0m, after a sweeping process failed on a retired wallet. USDT is Tether's dollar stablecoin, a crypto token designed to hold a steady value against the US dollar. That wallet was compromised in the July 2025 hack, which cost the exchange about $44m, or £32.9m. Some users kept sending deposits to those retired addresses, and accounts were credited as soon as the money arrived, so customers never saw a problem. Sweeping was supposed to move those funds into the main wallet. For a period it failed, and deposits built up in the retired address. What the exchange has not said is who moved the money out, or whether those addresses were breached a second time. It insists all user funds remain safe in secure, separate offline wallets. Retiring an address achieves little if customers can still pay into it. CoinDCX can explain how the $16m piled up, but not yet how it left.

Fifa's disciplinary code now runs on American time, and unpaid agents have been handed a lever. Since May, Fifa's disciplinary code has closed deadlines at midnight Eastern Standard Time on the last day, instead of midnight in central Europe. That pushes each deadline six hours later. An agent owed commission under a Fifa ruling can now ask the Disciplinary Committee to act, and the club could face a ban on registering players until the debt is settled. From January 2027, if a national football association leaves a final, binding award unenforced for 60 days, Fifa's Disciplinary Committee automatically takes charge of enforcing it. The award comes from a national dispute resolution chamber, a domestic body that settles football disputes. Sitting on unpaid agent commission through a transfer window is no longer an option, whatever time it is in Zurich.