Jeremy Hunt (The Chancellor of the Exchequer) will deliver the UK's 2024 Budget on Wednesday.
What will he announce in his speech to the Commons?
The General Election is coming up in the next 10 months - /SimonGrayson/uk-general-election-which-month-in. This means that this is likely to be the last budget before the election,
This is a free choice market and the individual resolutions are unrelated to each other - any number of them could resolve to YES or NO and that will not affect your payout.
Feel free to add more options to this market - you will get the trader bonus when other people trade on any options that you have added!
Market notes:
The market will resolve based on the statement to the Commons. If policies are later reversed or there is no time to implement them before the next election, that will not effect the outcome of this market.
If there are larger changes, I will attempt to resolve maximally. For example, if income tax is abolished then I will treat that as being a reduction (to zero) and an increase in the thresholds (to infinity).
Unless stated otherwise, these options are for permanent changes. If something is announced as a holiday or a carveout, that will not count (eg. announcing that VAT is being lowered for one year or that income tax will be reduced for under 40s will not count as lowering VAT or income tax)
1,000
3.00The remaining markets resolve to NO.
Will there be another budget or fiscal statement before the next election? Or is that the last time this government delivers one to Parliament?
I've resolved quite a few of these to YES. In the end it turned out that the changes trailed by the Guardian and other media outlets were all accurate with the headline being the 2p reduction in NI and a few other minor taxes like the vape tax on the other side of the ledger. The only change that wasn't fully expected was the introduction of an additional £5,000 ISA allowance purely for UK stocks and shares. It will be interesting to see the detail behind that!
For a moment I thought that Jeremy Hunt was going to make an enormous change when he spoke about the unfairness of having higher taxes on earned income than unearned income - it really sounded like he was about to combine income tax and NI. But then just just reduced NI by 2p.
I think that everything else will resolve NO as I didn't hear any mention of it during the budget, but I'm going to check the post-budget coverage to make sure I didn't miss anything. Please comment here if you think I missed anything!
Prime Ministers Questions has started, and Hunt is due to deliver the budget in about half an hour once it has finished.
You can watch live here:
https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/b64f9d82-a2ae-404a-9583-57de7aa49bff
You can also follow the Guardian's live coverage or the BBC's live coverage here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-68465603
A reminder that I will be resolving these markets based on what is announced in the budget - if Hunt makes an announcement and it then turns out that he was misrepresenting things or that he has to do a u-turn, it will still resolve to YES.
The Guardian predicts that Hunt will cut National Insurance by 2p and raise a few taxes to pay for the cut:
Limit tax breaks to non-doms
Tax vapes
Tax short-term holiday lets
Extend the energy windfall tax
Increase tax on business class flights
I've added markets for a few of these that didn't already exist!