The Economy Stalled. The Money Didn’t.

Britain's economy spent the week running on fumes. Why the UK Economy Faces a Stagnant Year Ahead reckoned with a flash PMI sinking to a 14-month low of 49.4, services at their weakest since 2023 and rate cuts now tipped to wait until 2027. Are You One of 8.7m Pensioners HMRC Overtaxed? picked over a decade of overcharging up to 8.7m pensioners — £43.5m last year alone — that the taxman sat on for two years. And BoE Scraps £20k Limit in Softer Stablecoin Rules unpicked the Bank's stablecoin climbdown, ditching its £20,000 cap for a £40bn system-wide one — still the world's strictest.

The money machine, by contrast, never stopped. SpaceX Bonds Kick Off a Mass Borrowing Spree dived into Musk's first investment-grade sale — at least $20bn (£15.1bn) of debt to bankroll a $75bn AI compute bet. Babcock Shares Eye a Global Defence Boom combed through a 4.3% dip to 1,004p on a £140m frigate hit, even as the dividend jumped 15% and nuclear hit 40% of income. Ocado Seeks New CEO as Shares Hit Decade Lows chronicled a 5% slide to 171p — below its 2010 float price — as founder Tim Steiner heads for the exit. Baillie Gifford Launches UK's First Tokenised Fund cracked open a blockchain-native bond fund yielding ~7%. And Monzo Backs The Hundred Ahead of Its 6th Season tackled why a branchless bank with 15m customers is buying its way into cricket.

The economy idled while the money machine roared. The rest of the issue's below…

Forget a dramatic crash — the UK economy today is doing something quietly more dangerous: grinding to a halt. Business activity has slumped to a 14-month low, the services sector is at its weakest since January 2023, and the one apparent bright spot, manufacturing, is built on borrowed time. With the Bank of England unlikely to cut rates before 2027, Britain is staring down a year of going nowhere.

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Here’s a sentence that would have sounded absurd a decade ago: Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is paying to restart Three Mile Island. The site of America’s worst nuclear accident is being revived — not for the grid, but to feed the soaring electricity demand of artificial intelligence. That scramble for clean, round-the-clock power has reframed the question of which nuclear energy stocks to buy and hold for the long haul — and four names sit right at the centre of it.

Beating the stock market is supposed to be hard — most professional fund managers can’t do it. So how has the QQQ ETF price, from one cheap and passive Invesco fund, beaten the S&P 500 in 16 of the past 20 years? The unglamorous answer: it isn’t really beating the market at all. It’s a giant, concentrated bet on a handful of tech megacaps — and lately, that bet keeps paying off.

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_{Using leverage increases risk of loss. Leverage is subject to the Firm's review and the customer's risk profile.}

Here’s a question worth asking your parents this week: has the taxman quietly been overcharging them? For up to 8.7m pensioners, the answer is yes. In short, HMRC overtaxed pensioners on their state pension for at least a decade — and knew about it for two years without telling a soul or refunding a penny.

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_{Using leverage increases risk of loss. Leverage is subject to the Firm's review and the customer's risk profile.}