One of my favourite things of selling my last house was the estate agent telling me about his view on the outlook for Bank Rate

I have five legal surnames (even after naturalisation, thanks Portugal 🙃) and this is maddening on every flight. Have also learned that though spaces are allowed in some, surnames are all processed without spaces in the boarding passes, with weird results for initialing due to character limits

It's like everyone's forgotten the economic calculation debate and that information a priori is what's unknowable - can't calibrate a model around latent information whose results only materialise 20 years into the future.

Although it seems you can just write a report saying it 🤷

3/ A much more insightful – though perhaps less cheery – conclusion from looking at the SFC’s forecast is that by 2028-29, funding will be £0.7 billion lower than their central estimate published on 29 May

2/ It essentially assumes that no additional funding would have been made available for the Scottish Government in cash terms relative to that in 2025-26 – which is not a credible baseline

8/ A cynic might suspect that the Chancellor knows this and is planning on finding a way of not having to deliver those planned cuts and avoid trade-offs on public services that are hard to stomach.

But that seems to be for another day, may even another year. Augustinian fiscal policy lives on

7/ And that leads us to what might be coming down the track. The overall envelope looks pretty undeliverable if you're going to protect some of the largest departments. It's a sort of 'mañana austerity' - this scenario is not implausible given total, but would imply a damaging rollercoaster effect

6/ And the other problem is that while it formally constrains spending, it doesn't really work as well as it seems. Look at the chart below - in every single SR period there has been significant policy in subsequent events, negating the seeming importance of this exercise

5/ The inflation and provision risk is passed to departments, which must manage it within set limits. This makes the Treasury's control function easier, but sets ministers against one another for an envelope that is broadly set already, and leads to strategic gaming that is hugely time consuming

4/ The problem? It failed to constrain public spending, particularly in the 1970s when inflation burst through the affordability of planned spending. The Treasury was forced to impose cash limits on departments to wrestle back control, and that is still largely the basis of the system