Starmer says Budget was ‘moment of personal pride’, as Reeves under pressure over build-up speech
Investment chief backs Reeves over Budget bufferpublished at 09:18 GMT
Archie Mitchell
Business reporter
Shanti Kelemen, co-chief investment officer at 7 Investment
Management, has backed the chancellor’s decision to build up a substantial
financial buffer in the Budget.
As we’ve been reporting, Rachel Reeves has been facing
questions after official forecaster the Office for Budget Responsibility
revealed she had billions of pounds of headroom against her self-imposed fiscal
rules, even without last week’s tax hikes.
She has argued it would have been irresponsible to deliver a
Budget leaving just £4.2bn of headroom.
And, asked about the row over whether Reeves had misled the
public over the state of the country’s finances, Kelemen told Radio 4’s Today
programme: “I don’t think it matters from an investment perspective. She
couldn’t have had a Budget with £4bn or £5bn of headroom. It would have been
too low.
“It’s probably a political question, all the stuff
around, what she knew when, but you probably couldn’t have just come out with
that amount and not had a reaction from the gilt market.”
