Five teams recovered from conceding first to go on and win on a pulsating night of Matchday 6 UEFA Champions League action, with Bayern München, Barcelona and Atalanta among those victorious.
The “premium” that the UK pays to borrow money compared with its international peers may be coming to an end as markets grow more confident about the government’s plans, a thinktank has suggested.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said that the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s announcement in the autumn budget that she would be more than doubling the UK’s financial headroom by 2030 from £9.9bn to £22bn had begun to assure bond markets about Labour’s fiscal approach.
Government bond yields – which is the return paid on government debt – have been increasing around the world in recent years, as a result of higher inflation, rising interest rates and countries running bigger deficits.
However, UK’s gilt yields have been higher than its peers, including the US and the eurozone, largely because the economy suffers from a “credibility problem” over whether its fiscal policies will be achieved, according to IPPR, a left-leaning thinktank.
UK yields have risen by 0.4 to 0.8 percentage points more than major peers since Labour won the 2024 election, the IPPR said, costing taxpayers up to £7bn a year. The government has spent £92bn on interest payments so far for this financial year, it said.
Bond yield graphic
The higher cost of borrowing for the UK comes despite the fundamentals of its economy being stronger than countries with lower borrowing costs. The UK’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 101%, compared with 122% in the US and 237% in Japan, and the government is planning to halve the amount it borrows each year by the end of this parliament.
The problem is that bond traders think the UK is not good at keeping to its fiscal policies, the IPPR said. The mini-budget in 2022 under the Liz Truss administration “showed how quickly a UK government could bypass the fiscal framework”, the thinktank said. It added that in the years leading up to this event, successive chancellors had “repeatedly changed, missed or redefined their own fiscal rules” or changed themselves, with seven different chancellors from 2016 up to the 2024 election. A “lack of trust in stated fiscal policy has set in, as actions have spoken louder than words,” it said.
However, the autumn budget prompted the UK premium against the eurozone to almost halve. William Ellis, a senior economist at IPPR, said: “The premium on UK borrowing costs appears to be easing, showing that markets are responding to growing confidence in the government’s fiscal approach. Sticking to its fiscal plans could save the exchequer billions and free up fiscal space in the future.”
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IPPR said another way to lower borrowing costs would be for the Bank of England to pause its sale of government bonds after “selling them at a record pace”.
Carsten Jung, the associate director for economic policy at IPPR, said: “The Bank of England needs to pull its weight. Actively selling government bonds is adding unnecessary pressure to the gilt market. It should stop – just as every other major central bank has.”
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On December 5, 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) agreed to modify certain long-standing restrictions placed on major investment banks as part of a court settlement (commonly referred to as the “global research settlement”) in the early 2000s. The restrictions, which were designed to address alleged conflicts of interest between the firms’ equity research and investment banking arms, included a communications firewall between the two arms.
The SEC’s action was in response to motions filed by several of the major banks party to the global research settlement requesting that they be released from certain of the restrictions under the global research settlement. In their motions, the banks argued that those restrictions were no longer necessary because comprehensive, industry wide regulation—principally Rule 2241 of the rules of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which was adopted in 2015—now addresses the very conflicts of interest those restrictions were designed to manage, noting that the global research settlement itself anticipated this outcome by presuming modification once such rules were adopted. The banks further argued that, after a decade of effective enforcement of FINRA Rule 2241, maintaining a parallel, settlement specific regime for only the banks party to the global research settlement creates a fractured framework that imposes unnecessary burdens and costs without corresponding investor protection benefits.
The global research settlement imposes several prescriptive restrictions that FINRA Rule 2241 does not, most notably a blanket ban on direct communications between investment bankers and research analysts except for narrowly enumerated exceptions. For example, the banks noted that the following actions, which would not pose any relevant conflict of interest under FINRA Rule 2241, are barred under the global research settlement: (1) bankers asking analysts for purely ministerial information (such as dial in details for a public research call); (2) bankers passively (i.e., in “listen only” mode) attending a research analyst call with company management; and (3) bankers facilitating or even alerting an analyst to an investor’s or corporate client’s request for an introduction or discussion. The banks further noted that while the global research settlement mandates communication rules that often require legal/compliance chaperoning, FINRA Rule 2241 uses a principles based “information barriers and policies/procedures” approach that allows benign interactions so long as conflicts are effectively managed.
In a statement hailing the SEC’s consent to the modification, SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda noted that “the [SEC] took an important step toward eliminating outdated and costly requirements on firms and improving the availability of equity research in our markets by agreement to amend the [global research settlement].”
The proposed modifications remain subject to court approval.
Another year, another stack of great books to read. PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown talked with Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, and author Ann Patchett about their top picks this year.
