Simon Lambert

Jeremy Hunt had to come in and do his fun police routine where he reintroduced,

the 45p tax band and dropped it down to just over 125 grand rather than 150 000 hence the fact that all of a sudden the number of people paying it went up 57 the tax years we're talking about here 2022 2023 to 2023 2024 so obviously these numbers although they're the most recent available

are massively out of date and there's going to be a lot more people paying that level of tax now, a lot more people paying 40% tax as well.

Germany gets hot in the summer as well, so if you want a bit of a city heat thing... It's got lovely countryside as well, and if you go out of the cities, you've got lots of lakes, and the Germans are allowed to swim in their lakes, unlike the Brits, for some reason.

Well, but the advantage of it being tiny is it's also really easy to leave and go somewhere else.

No offence to people in Luxembourg.

£2 billion.

That is what NatWest's profits were in the first quarter of this year.

So that's only in three months.

£2 billion, having generated £4.4 billion of revenues.

That is up 12% on a year earlier.

The net interest margin, the difference between what it makes on loans and pays on savings, rose to 2.47% from 2.27% a year earlier.

And NatWest is just the latest bank to tell us that it is profiting from the fact that interest rates are staying higher for longer than thought and are potentially going to go up.

And talking about mortgage rates earlier, the banks have been benefiting from this mortgage rate rise.

So, yeah.

Good news for banks, bad news for everyone else.

It's not because the banks are all right.

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