Closing post: More thatn £6bn wiped off UK bank shares today
And finally… the London stock market has closed, with losses across the UK banking sector.
The possibility that Rachel Reeves might bring in new taxes on the sector in this autumn’s budget has sparked a wave of selling.
NatWest ended the day as the FTSE 100’s biggest faller, down 4.85%.
Lloyds Banking Group (-3.3%) and Barclays (-2.2%) ended in the list of top fallers, along with UK retailers JD Sports (-4%) and Kingfisher (-2.2%).
HSBC lost 1%.
The falls mean that over £6bn was wiped off the UK banking sector today, as fresh calls for a windfall tax on large lenders in the autumn budget spooked investors.
As my colleague Kalyeena Makortoff explains:
Calls for a tax grab, in a paper written by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank, took a toll on some of the UK’s biggest high street banks.
The IPPR’s report calls for a new tax on the big banks that would help to recover “windfalls” enjoyed by lenders as a result of an emergency economic policy known as quantitative easing, which was put in place after the 2008 financial crisis.
The policy involved the Bank of England buying up £895bn of bonds from the UK’s banks and crediting them with reserves at the Bank. Those reserves subsequently accrued interest at the central bank’s base interest rate: currently at 4%.
On that note, goodnight! GW
Updated
YouGov: t only 27% of Britons oppose requiring landlords to pay National Insurance on rental income
Another tax raising option for Rachel Reeves is to make landlords pay National Insurance on their rental income.
It emerged yesterday that the Treasury was considering a tax on landlords that will target income from rents, as part of the autumn budget.
YouGov have just release a poll which shows the measure could be popular with voters. Nearly half of those polled said they supported the idea, while just 27% opposed it, and 25% didn’t know.
