The People Who Got This War Wrong Set Your Interest Rate
Neil Woodford on the war the market refuses to price. Missiles are hitting the Gulf, America is back at war, and the S&P 500 finished the week up 1%. The institutions that modelled this conflict predicted catastrophe. The market looked at the same war and said no. One of them is wrong.
Jon and Neil unpack the biggest forecasting failure since Brexit: how the IEA, the Bank of England and the EIA all got the oil shock wrong, and how the market repriced the war line by line while the models stood still. Neil explains why complex economic models fail structurally, what he uses instead (one number, no model), and the scenarios that would prove him wrong, from a Bank of England rate rise to the closure of a second strait.
đź”— Links & Resources
- Read Neil's companion piece, Truth Is Ever to Be Found in Simplicity:Â
- The Noise Cancelling app, new this week: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6784789879Â
- Visit https://www.noisecancelling.co/apps for more information
About The Noise Cancelling Podcast
Neil Woodford and Jon Adair cut through financial noise: what moved, what it means, and what would change their minds.
Hosts: Neil Woodford, Jon Adair
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ncwithnwÂ
More episodes
UK Inflation Will Stay at 3% — Here’s Why the Market Is Wrong
UK inflation is falling while oil is up 35% and gilt yields are at an 18-year high. Neil Woodford explains why the 4-5% inflation forecasts are wrong again, what is actually in the CPI basket, and why the bond market may be pricing the wrong story.
Show notesBritain’s Productivity Crisis: A Great Deception?
Is the UK's productivity crisis actually real? The ONS has quietly admitted its Labour Force Survey overstated UK employment, and the HMRC tax data tells a completely different story about the UK economy, your taxes and interest rates. In this episode, Neil Woodford explains what the tax records really show about UK productivity, why the official survey invented half a million workers who don't exist, and how one wrong number fed both the OBR forecast that drove Rachel Reeves' tax rises and the Bank of England's view of how fast the economy can grow before rates must stay high. We also get into the collapse in graduate jobs and what it says about AI adoption in the UK, whether Britain's productivity has genuinely accelerated since 2024, and how the UK really compares with the G7. Stay to the end for what a correction means for the November Budget, mortgage rates, gilts and rate-sensitive UK stocks, and where Neil sees the opportunity. Read Neil's full written analysis Neil's first piece on this from 2024
Show notesThe 7 Decisions Every Investor Faces (Part 1)
Neil Woodford has been answering questions about investing for 35 years – and every one of them comes down to seven decisions. In part one of this three-part series, Neil and Jon Adair cover the funnel: the three decisions that take you from every company in the world down to a shortlist worth owning.
Show notesGo deeper than the podcast
Access the strategies, research, and real-time portfolio data behind the conversations.