Britain’s in the Bargain Bin

Britain, marked down

Britain is being quietly marked down. The Bank of England looks set to hold rates at 3.75% on Thursday — a bet that Brent near $100 fades before inflation, now 2.6%, climbs toward the 4% that would force its hand. The housing market is already doing the marking: overpriced homes take four times longer to sell, Savills found — 28 days becomes 100 after a single price cut, with London down 3.7% and Westminster off a brutal 22.8%. And where sellers see a discount, buyers see a bargain: private equity is hoovering up London's cheap blue-chips, DCC the latest at £5.75bn, one of 11 billion-pound bids that now total £69bn this year.

The tech long game

The bigger money, though, is playing a longer game. Alphabet lifted its AI budget to $205bn — with more promised next year — and that torrent lands on a short list of suppliers, from Nvidia's software moat to SK Hynix, which owns over half the memory market the whole boom runs on. Crypto is being reshaped by rules, not prices: with fewer than 20% of Europe's banks offering crypto, Britain's incoming FCA regime looks set to hand the next wave to the banks, not the challengers it was meant to help. And a deadline is forming on the horizon — the quantum computer that could break Bitcoin's cryptography now points to 2029, though the real weak spot isn't the maths, it's getting 90% of miners to vote for the fix in time.

The Bank's waiting, the housing market's folding and private equity's filling its trolley — Britain's cheap, and only the long-game money seems to have noticed. To the rest of the issue. — MJB.

Inflation slowed to 2.6 per cent in the year to June, and the Bank of England is expected to do precisely nothing about it on Thursday. But the calm is a bet, not a verdict. Brent crude has climbed to just shy of $100 a barrel as conflict flares again in the Middle East, and every rate-setter on the Monetary Policy Committee has to decide whether that spike fades quietly or follows Britain into 2027.

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DCC (LON: DCC) has agreed to a £5.75bn takeover by private equity, and the price only got there after several of its largest shareholders pushed back. But that is the London market in 2026 in miniature. Britain’s listed companies are cheap enough that buyers can lowball them, get caught, raise the offer slightly, and still walk away with a bargain.

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Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has set out plans to spend up to $205bn (~£153.9bn) this year, yet the number that matters more is next year’s. The company plans to spend even more on AI infrastructure then. Investors had spent months bracing for a capital expenditure slowdown that never arrived. When one hyperscaler raises its ceiling this publicly, the rest of the industry tends to follow — and the money lands on a surprisingly short list of suppliers.

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There's a very British optimism in listing your house at the top of the range and waiting for a buyer to agree with you. The market, it turns out, doesn't do flattery — it does arithmetic, and it will happily let your home sit there for a hundred days while it waits for you to see sense. — MJB.