Chaos Pays. Britain’s Millionaires Leave.

Britain's money map

Britain spent Tuesday taking stock of its own money — where it's pooling, and where it's draining. Barclays proved chaos pays: pre-tax profit jumped 17% to £6.1bn as Iran-rattled markets flooded its investment bank, funding a fresh £1bn buyback — though its 45% equity-trading growth still trailed Wall Street's 69%. The wealthy, meanwhile, are thinning out: the millionaire count fell to 442,000, the lowest since 2008, roughly 170,300 gone since 2022, with tax not Brexit to blame. Capital is pooling hardest in defence, where a record £3bn flooded into start-ups and deals jumped 56% as BAE and Lockheed turned venture capitalist. Burnham's answer to the drain: a £1bn fund to steer pension money back into British firms, after their share of UK equities slid from 50% to under 5%.

Rules, concentration and cost

For investors, the day's theme was rules, concentration and cost. In Washington, the crypto Clarity Act lost its Senate slot to Russia sanctions and nominations, and with recess starting 8 August it risks missing 2026 — leaving regulators, not lawmakers, to write the rulebook. In crypto itself, concentration hit an extreme: Bitmine's treasury now holds 4.8% of all ether, worth $11.2bn, after buying nearly 10,000 more coins and 6.1m of its own shares in a week — a supply squeeze wearing a balance sheet. The quiet lesson came from two defensive ETFs: VDC charges 0.09% against FTXG's 0.60%, a fee gap wider than the yield it buys — and the cheaper fund won on returns too. Fees, not headlines, decide the boring corners.

Money pooling with the winners, draining from the wealthy, and one treasury quietly cornering a currency — that's the week's shape. To the rest of the issue. — MJB.

Britain had 612,300 millionaires in 2022. It has 442,000 now — a seven per cent drop on the previous year alone, yet the collapse started well after Brexit rather than because of it. That is roughly 170,300 fewer in three years, and the number of British millionaires now sits at its lowest since the 2008 financial crisis. Tax is doing most of the work.

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One company now owns 4.8% of every ether in circulation. Bitmine added another 9,946 ETH last week, and its Ethereum treasury is up to roughly 5.79 million tokens worth $11.2 billion (~£8.4bn). Most treasury stories are about balance sheets. This one is about supply — because every coin Bitmine buys is a coin the market cannot. Tom Lee, Bitmine’s chairman, reckons the ETH/BTC ratio is telling him to keep going. The float is getting thinner.

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FTXG pays a bigger dividend than VDC. That is the only round it wins. The higher-yielding of these two defensive funds charges 0.60% a year against VDC’s 0.09%, yet the yield advantage is only 0.46 percentage points, smaller than the fee gap swallowing it. Income you can see. Costs you mostly do not. That is the whole argument.

One had a dedicated owner. Resolution rate: 48.9%. One didn't: 0.38%. See the full breakdown.

See the data

There's a neat symmetry to Tuesday: a bank made a fortune from everyone else's panic, and the country's millionaires read the room and left. Chaos, it seems, pays handsomely — just not to the people footing the tax bill. One quarter's turmoil, banked; a decade's wealth, quietly packing a suitcase. — MJB.