Bond market power: why Rachel Reeves is keen to keep the £2.7tn ‘beast’ onside

For months Rachel Reeves has been schmoozing the biggest players in the UK government debt market to ensure the smooth passage of her plans. Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/Treasury

At just after 12.30pm on Wednesday, the machine will be listening, the trading algorithms ready, and billions of pounds of buy-and-sell orders stacked up awaiting Rachel Reeves’s budget.

For the first time on the London trading floor of Deutsche Bank, a custom-built artificial intelligence tool will tune in to the chancellor’s speech. It will transcribe her words, spot shifts in tone and spit out alerts when the numbers deviate from expectations.