Seven prime ministers in ten years. Seven. And people wonder why hedge funds are shorting everything with a UK listing.

Burnham came in promising the biggest changes in 40 years and fair play he actually did something in week one.. scrapped sales tax on household electricity which is bold given the state of the public finances. Reeves is gone as chancellor. Healey is in. The whole Starmer lot got cleared out basically. And the short sellers are having a field day with it.. White and Case counted 27 companies with over 5 percent short interest in the first half of the year. Utilities getting it worst apparently because the water infrastructure is genuinely falling apart and now youve got a PM who wants to squeeze the sector even harder on regulation. One fund manager called it an explosive cocktail. Comforting.

The footsie ended around 10,765 which doesnt sound bad until you realise its the first down week in five and the miners dragged it there almost single handedly. Antofagasta lost nearly 7 percent Thursday. Rio off 5. Fresnillo about the same. The mining index as a whole down 4.7 percent which is the worst week since March. Copper coming off that record high and suddenly everyones a seller.

Aviva had a good one actually. Profits up 24 percent. Nobody cared.

GDP is the bit that does my head in though. The headline for Q2 is expected at 0.4 percent which sounds fine right.. except the World Cup was on and there were like three heatwaves so services got a massive one off boost. The Bank of England basically said yeah ignore that number the underlying picture is flat. EY reckon 0.9 for the year. KPMG say 0.7. IMF just bumped theirs to 1 from 0.8 but its the kind of upgrade that nobody celebrates. Theyve got a scenario where if Hormuz stays shut into next year the economy actually contracts which.. yeah.

Core CPI coming down to 2.6 in June was the one genuinely good bit of data. Lowest since March 2025 and probably linked to that brief ceasefire window when oil prices eased off. But everyone knows energy is going to feed back through in the second half. Its already started.

The footsie sitting near record highs while the economy underneath it is arguably stagnant is one of those things that either resolves itself quietly or very loudly. History suggests loudly but what do I know.