Dogs can sniff out stress on owner's breath - BBC

Queen's University, Belfast

Our canine companions have proven once again how finely tuned they are to our feelings - this time in scientific sniffing test.

Scientists discovered that dogs can smell stress in our breath and sweat.

Four dogs - pets volunteered by their owners - were trained to "choose" one of three scent canisters.

And in more than 650 out of 700 trials, they successfully identified a sample of sweat or breath that had been taken from a stressed person.

The researchers, at Queen's University Belfast, hope their study, published in the journal Plos One, will help in the training of therapy dogs.

• How long will your dog live?
• Dogs 'prevent stressed students dropping out'

Dogs experience their world through smell. And their highly sensitive scent-detection abilities are already used to detect drugs, explosives, and illnesses, including certain cancers, diabetes and even Covid.

"We had lots of evidence that dogs can pick up smells from humans that are associated with certain medical conditions or disease - but we don't have much evidence that they can smell differences in our psychological state," lead researcher Clara Wilson said.

Victoria Gill

The 36 human volunteers reported their stress levels before and after completing a difficult maths problem.

Each can contained a sample of their sweat or breath from before or - as long as their blood pressure and heart rate had also increased - after.

And if the dogs, Treo, Fingal, Soot and Winnie, stood still or sat in front of the "stressed" sample, they were rewarded with a favourite dog treat.

Follow Victoria on Twitter.

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2022-09-29 00:59:18Z
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Tory MPs question Kwasi Kwarteng's future as market turmoil continues - Financial Times

A number of Conservative MPs claimed on Wednesday that UK chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng cannot survive the market turmoil unleashed by his new economic plan, with one former cabinet minister saying “I think he’s dead”.

Tory MPs were despairing after another day of market chaos, with the Bank of England announcing plans to buy government bonds, effectively to defend the economy from Kwarteng’s own policy.

Some MPs claimed that UK prime minister Liz Truss was trying to distance herself from Kwarteng’s economic strategy, even though she was instrumental in devising the plan of debt-funded tax cuts worth £45bn.

Truss has not made a public statement since the market turmoil began and there have been tensions between the prime minister and Kwarteng over how to handle it. Kwarteng’s allies said the chancellor would not quit.

But one former cabinet minister told the Financial Times that Kwarteng could not survive the fallout: “I think he’s dead, but in the Tory party death can take many forms. It can take a long time.”

Another Tory MP, who is a member of the government, said: “Liz has a pretty quick choice to make: either she bullets her chancellor and changes course, or she could lose her premiership within a month.

“She will struggle to get any legislation through parliament unless she changes course because we won’t vote for it. We won’t ever get to vote on this package because the markets will destroy it first.”

MPs have to vote on a finance bill in order to implement parts of the fiscal package, although no date has yet been set, but ill-feeling could also spill over into wider ill-discipline during other contentious votes.

Truss will be loath to lose her chancellor, who is an old friend. Both she and Kwarteng have insisted that they will stick to the course they have set out of tax cuts and supply-side reforms intended to boost growth.

Kwarteng’s allies declined to comment on the criticism being aimed at him and the chancellor was on Wednesday holding talks with banks about future City of London reforms, a sign that he sees business continuing as usual.

Most Tory MPs remain disciplined and are refusing to criticise the government publicly, not least since the party chose a new leader only three weeks ago.

Kwarteng told City leaders on Tuesday he was “confident” his policies would work and was preparing to roll out new supply-side reforms, including on City regulation, childcare and digital technology.

“We don’t want blue on blue attacks at a moment like this,” said one senior Tory MP.

If Truss were to remove her chancellor, it would leave her exposed and be a clear political admission of economic incompetence. But some Conservative MPs claim that Truss is subtly trying to distance herself from the unfolding chaos.

They say that in a briefing note to Tory MPs, the £150bn state energy support plan was described as “the prime minister’s energy package”, while the controversial tax-cutting “mini” Budget was described as “the chancellor’s growth plan”.

Truss and Kwarteng disagreed on Monday on whether the Treasury and BoE should issue statements to reassure the markets, Tory insiders said. They added that 10 Downing Street was much more relaxed about the market chaos than the Treasury and wanted to ride out the storm.

Ultimately, the BoE announced it would “not hesitate” to raise interest rates and Kwarteng released a statement saying he would produce a debt-cutting plan on November 23. However, senior City figures warned the chancellor on Wednesday that date was too far away.

Allies of Truss insisted that she fully supported Kwarteng and his growth plan, describing talk of tensions as “nonsense”. One said: “They’re in lockstep.”

Truss herself is feeling the heat. One member of the 1922 backbench committee of Conservative MPs speculated that at least 10 letters of no confidence had gone in already.

“Next week at conference they need to show they can dig us out of this hole or it’s terminal for her,” the MP said, referring to the upcoming Tory party conference in Birmingham. “They’ve behaved like an Oxbridge debating society, it’s just idiotic.”

A former minister said that “MPs won’t stand idly by” if Labour maintained a large poll lead. This week YouGov gave the opposition party a record 17-point lead over the Conservatives.

But one veteran Tory MP advised caution. “People aren’t stopping to think for a second about how ludicrous that would look, how we would be the laughing stock of the world if we tried to get rid of her now,” he said.

Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor and Tory leadership contender who predicted market chaos if Truss pursued unfunded tax cuts, is not expected to attend the party’s conference.

But his former supporters are starting to criticise the new administration. Mel Stride, Tory chair of the Commons Treasury committee, said he could not understand why Kwarteng promised “more to come” on tax cuts, even as markets recoiled from the borrowing required to fund the first batch.

Some Tory grandees have defended Kwarteng against criticism from the IMF. Lord David Frost, former Brexit secretary, said the IMF was wedded to policies that led to slow growth and weak productivity.

Lord Daniel Hannan, writing for the website ConservativeHome, said the sterling sell-off was not caused by unfunded tax cuts, but by a “belief that this Budget has made a Labour victory more likely”.

Tory-supporting media outlets have sought others to blame. “Fury at the City slickers betting against UK plc,” was the Daily Mail’s front-page headline on Tuesday.

Some Tory MPs believe Truss could make a start by reversing one of the most contentious tax cuts in last week’s package: the abolition of the 45p additional income tax rate for earnings of more than £150,000.

Cabinet sources said the plan was not revealed to them before Kwarteng announced it. Kwarteng’s allies declined to comment on the topic. One Tory MP from a northern seat said: “We all wanted tax cuts, but no one on 150k a year has ever complained to me about their 45 per cent tax rate.”

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2022-09-28 16:48:24Z
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Bank of England warns of risk to UK financial stability as it intervenes in gilt market - Financial Times

The Bank of England took emergency action on Wednesday, unleashing a £65bn bond-buying programme aimed at stemming a spiralling crisis in government debt markets.

The central bank warned of a “material risk to UK financial stability” from turmoil in the UK government bond market, which was sparked by chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts and borrowing plan last week.

The BoE suspended a programme to sell gilts — part of an effort to get surging inflation under control — and instead pledged to buy long-dated bonds at a rate of £5bn a day for the next 13 weekdays.

Economists warned that the injection of billions of pounds of newly minted money into the economy could fuel inflation. “This move will be inflationary at a time of already high inflation,” said Daniel Mahoney, UK economist at Handelsbanken.

The BoE also raised the prospect of a “tightening of financing conditions and a reduction of the flow of credit to the real economy”.

UK government bond markets recovered sharply after the announcement but the pound fell, down 0.8 per cent against the dollar in afternoon trading in London on Wednesday to $1.064.

At a meeting with the chancellor earlier on Wednesday, bankers urged Kwarteng not to wait until a planned statement on November 23 to take action to calm the markets. One person at the meeting, which included Citi, Bank of America, UBS, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, said that date was too far away.

Another banker said: “The message from our side of the table was: ‘Whatever you do, keep on informing the markets. We have orderly markets today, but lord knows we don’t want to see panic tomorrow.’”

Following the Bank’s intervention, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called for parliament to be recalled and for Kwarteng to abandon his plans.

The BoE took the emergency measure after Kwarteng’s fiscal package last week sent the pound tumbling and set off historic falls in gilt prices.

That market turmoil heaped pressure on pension funds to sell bonds to stave off concerns about solvency. Thousands of such groups had faced urgent demands for additional cash from investment managers to meet margin calls after the collapse in UK government bond prices blew a hole in strategies to protect them against inflation and interest-rate risks.

The BoE said its action was designed to restore order. “The Bank will carry out temporary purchases of long-dated UK government bonds from 28 September,” it said. “The purchases will be carried out on whatever scale is necessary to effect this outcome,” it added, saying the Treasury would underwrite any losses.

The Bank maintains that its willingness to act sends a strong signal to financial markets and that sellers of long-dated UK gilts run the risk of another sizeable intervention.

The BoE’s Financial Policy Committee welcomed the “plans for temporary and targeted purchases in the gilt market on financial stability grounds at an urgent pace”.

After the announcement, 30-year gilt yields, which earlier on Wednesday touched a 20-year high above 5 per cent, fell 1 percentage point to 4 per cent — their biggest drop for any single day on record, according to Tradeweb data. Yields fall when prices rise. Ten-year yields slipped to 4.1 per cent from 4.59 per cent.

The BoE said its action would be “strictly time-limited” and came after market participants said there was a “proper shit show” happening in government bond markets.

The Treasury blamed “significant volatility” in “global financial markets” rather than the chancellor’s unfunded tax cuts last week.

“The chancellor is committed to the Bank of England’s independence. The government will continue to work closely with the Bank in support of its financial stability and inflation objectives,” the Treasury said.

But Gerard Lyons, who has been advising Liz Truss, Britain’s new prime minister, on economic strategy, said on Wednesday he had urged Kwarteng to keep financial markets and affordability in mind before cutting taxes.

Lyons told the Financial Times that ministers “mustn’t say anything further to exacerbate the situation” and should stress parts of the government’s growth plan that did not involve unfunded tax cuts.

He criticised the chancellor’s decision to wait before announcing his wider plans to stabilise public finances. “I don’t understand why we have to wait until late November,” Lyons said.

The BoE’s intervention followed days of intense pressure on the UK pension schemes that manage savings for millions of Britons. Over the long term, higher yields are helpful for pension schemes as they help them to harvest higher returns. But in the short term, the collapse in UK bond prices has hammered the so-called liability-driven investment (LDI) strategies that many use to shield themselves from adverse moves in inflation.

Between £1tn and £1.5tn of the liabilities held by final salary pension funds are covered by LDI strategies, which are backed by collateral such as equities, corporate bonds and gilts. But the value of those gilts has cratered, leaving pension schemes racing to sell assets to top up stashes of collateral. Some schemes have sold government bonds to meet those demands, creating a vicious circle of bond price declines.

“It is the speed of the rises,” said Dan Mikulskis, investment partner at LCP, an actuarial consultant advising pension schemes. “You have had multiple record moves in yields on successive days, you have had a year’s worth of yield rises in just a few days. The size of [collateral] buffers has been based on historical moves in gilt yields.”

Simon Bentley, head of solutions at Columbia Threadneedle, an LDI provider, said there appeared to have been “no real consideration” by the government of the impact of its tax cut and borrowing plan on the different parts of the market.

“It would appear the government was unaware or did not do enough research to understand the impact on pension funds and pension members in the UK, with these developments potentially impacting many, many people,” he added.

Additional reporting by Katie Martin, Josephine Cumbo, Chris Flood and Tommy Stubbington

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2022-09-28 13:53:17Z
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Keir Starmer demands tax rethink after IMF alert — follow live - The Times

The Bank of England has announced an emergency intervention in Britain’s financial markets to head off a “material risk to UK financial stability” after last week’s budget.

In a highly unusual move the Bank said it would start buying long-term government debt to tackle a surge in the cost of borrowing, which it said risked “contagion” to households and businesses.

Some of the country’s largest pension funds had warned the Bank that they were facing a cash crisis caused by the unprecedented rise in yields on long-dated government bonds.

The Bank also announced it was delaying longstanding plans to begin winding down quantitative easing, which was due to start next week.

It follows days of market turmoil that has pushed up the cost of government

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2022-09-28 09:40:00Z
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IMF urges UK to 're-evaluate' tax cuts in biting attack on fiscal plan - Financial Times

The IMF has launched a biting attack on the UK’s plan to implement £45bn of debt-funded tax cuts, urging the government to “re-evaluate” the plan and warning that the “untargeted” package threatens to stoke soaring inflation.

The multilateral lender said it was “closely monitoring” developments in the UK and was “engaged with the authorities” after Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled the tax cuts last week, sparking a collapse in the value of sterling and a surge in the country’s borrowing costs.

“Given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture,” the IMF said in a statement. “It is important that fiscal policy does not work at cross purposes to monetary policy.”

Janet Yellen, US Treasury secretary, said the US was “monitoring developments very closely”. She declined to be drawn on the merits of the plan but noted that the US and the UK had “significant inflation problems and central banks focused on . . . bring[ing] inflation down”.

She added the financial turmoil of recent days appeared to be confined to Britain rather than spreading to the global economy and that financial markets that had sold off sharply were “functioning well”.

The pound remained under pressure on Wednesday morning, trading 0.3 per cent lower against the dollar at $1.070. UK government bonds steadied after enduring a historic sell-off in the past three trading sessions, pushing borrowing costs down slightly. Ten-year gilt yields were 0.03 percentage points lower at 4.48 per cent, up from 3.5 per cent last week.

At an event hosted by the Economic Club of Washington DC, Brian Deese, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said he “wasn’t surprised” by the reaction to the UK’s fiscal plan, saying “it puts the [central bank] in a position of potentially having to move even tighter”.

He added: “It is particularly important to maintain a focus on fiscal prudence.”

In its first assessment of the UK situation, Moody’s, the credit rating agency, offered critical commentary, saying that large unfunded tax cuts would lead to rising borrowing costs and lower growth.

Though it did not change the UK’s credit rating, Moody’s warned that a “large unfunded fiscal stimulus . . . will prompt more aggressive monetary policy tightening, weighing on growth in the medium term”.

The IMF’s pointed criticism of Kwarteng’s fiscal plan came as some business leaders in the UK hit out at the tax cuts, while the Bank of England’s chief economist warned it would need to react with a “significant monetary response”.

The IMF said it understood the UK government’s desire to help “families and businesses deal with the energy [price] shock” while “boosting growth” with supply-side reforms.

But it raised the concerns that the tax cuts, which will disproportionately benefit high earners, “will likely increase inequality”. It called on Kwarteng to use the budget on November 23 to “provide support that is more targeted and re-evaluate the tax measures”.

Following the IMF statement, the UK Treasury said the November budget would “set out further details on the government’s fiscal rules, including ensuring that debt falls as a share of GDP in the medium term”. It added the government had acted “at speed to protect households and businesses through this winter and the next”.

The opposition Labour party seized on the IMF statement, with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves saying it “should set alarm bells ringing in” Westminster and calling on the government to “urgently lay out how it will fix the problems it has created”.

Eswar Prasad, a former senior IMF official, said: “This is a hard-hitting and pointed criticism that pulls few punches. This is as close as IMF language comes to calling a set of policies irresponsible, ill-advised and ill-timed.”

Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury official and ex-IMF representative, said the statement was “unusual in its sharpness” but that he approved of the fund being “a ruthless truth teller”.

Adnan Mazarei, former deputy director at the IMF, described the statement as “on the strong side” and said the fund was “concerned, especially about the risks of a spillover”, which he described as “tangible”.

He added: “The UK authorities have embarked on an unnecessarily risky path.”

Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Bridgewater, said the UK was “operating like the government of an emerging country”.

Dalio’s remarks came after Larry Summers, former US Treasury secretary, on Monday called the policy “utterly irresponsible” and said the violent market reaction was “a hallmark of situations where credibility has been lost”.

The pair joined Raphael Bostic, president of the Atlanta branch of the Federal Reserve, who this week warned that the UK’s plan increased economic uncertainty and raised the odds of a global recession.

Last week, Jason Furman, an economic adviser to former US president Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter: “I can’t remember a more uniformly negative reaction to any policy announcement by both economists and financial markets than the UK’s policy.”

Additional reporting by Tommy Stubbington in London

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2022-09-28 08:19:51Z
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William promises to improve his Welsh during first visit as prince - The Times

The Prince of Wales admitted that he needs to brush up on his Welsh as he made his first trip to the nation since taking up his new title.

The couple’s visit to Holyhead came as a royal source said that William had “no plans” for an investiture like his father’s at Caernarfon in 1969.

William and the Princess of Wales were given a warm welcome as they visited a lifeboat station where a small boy who had been waiting for four hours to see the couple was plucked from the crowd to give them flowers.

The couple were welcomed at the RNLI station with a bouquet of flowers from a boy aged four

PAUL ELLIS/GETTY IMAGES

Rebecca Crompton, Theo’s mother, said they had been on their way to school when they changed their mind at the last minute to see the couple at the Holyhead

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2022-09-27 15:45:00Z
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Mortgage lenders pull deals due to interest rate rise fears - BBC

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Some mortgage deals have been withdrawn by banks and building societies after a fall in the pound fuelled forecasts of a sharp rise in interest rates.

Virgin Money and Skipton Building Society halted mortgage offers for new customers while Bank of Ireland said it had withdrawn all mortgages.

Halifax said it would stop mortgages with product fees.

The Bank of England said on Monday it would "not hesitate" to hike interest rates after the pound hit record lows.

The pound plunged against the dollar on Monday after comments at the weekend from Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng pledging more tax cuts, on top of Friday's mini-budget when he announced the biggest tax cuts for 50 years. Overnight, the pound stabilised at $1.08 after hitting a record low of $1.03 on Monday.

The mini-budget plans will require a large increase in government borrowing and concerns among investors about the country's ability to meet that debt led to the value of the pound being pushed down while the cost of UK government borrowing also soared.

Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers tweeted: "I was very pessimistic about the consequences of utterly irresponsible UK policy on Friday. But, I did not expect markets to get so bad so fast."

A weaker pound also makes imports and goods priced in dollars, such as oil, much more costly and risks fuelling price rises at a time when UK inflation is at its highest for 40 years.

The Bank of England said it would make a full assessment as to whether it should change interest rates at its next meeting on 3 November, following speculation it might have intervened earlier.

• Bank will not hesitate to raise interest rates
• Why has the pound tumbled?
• Has your mortgage deal been withdrawn? Are you worried about rising interest rates? Share your experiences by emailinghaveyoursay@bbc.co.uk

Following Monday's volatility, financial markets updated predictions and said interest rates could now more than double by next spring to 5.8%, from their current level of 2.25%, to curb inflation - the rate at which prices for consumers rise.

Experts said a rise in the cost of long-term borrowing meant the current cost to mortgage lenders of offering new deals was now more expensive. There are also concerns that would-be borrowers will rush to secure mortgages at favourable rates before interest rates rise and if they do jump, homeowners will not be able to afford higher repayments.

Some 8.3 million people have mortgages in the UK, according to UK Finance, the trade association.

The number of residential mortgages on offer by lenders fell to 3,596 on Tuesday, according to financial information firm Moneyfacts, compared with 3,961 deals on Friday when the mini-budget was announced. It is also a sharp fall from the number available in December last year when the Bank of England started raising interest rates.

Julie-Ann Haines, chief executive at Principality Building Society, said: "As a lender what we need to do is one of two things. Firstly to make sure that customer mortgages are affordable. We have to do that under regulation and we therefore need to stress-test and make sure that if the Bank of England base rates go up that consumers can still afford their mortgage.

"And of course the second thing is banks and building societies have to be able to make a margin and so they have to price that increased financial market view of the interest rates into their products, and that's why you're seeing [mortgage] rates start to really go up quite fast over the past two to three months."

The Bank has already lifted interest rates seven times in a row since December to the highest rate in 14 years.

In August, the Bank scrapped a mortgage affordability rule which required banks and building societies to stress test whether homeowners could cope with a 3% rise in interest rates.

Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said if interest rates rise as predicted, the average household refinancing a two-year fixed rate mortgage in the first half of next year would see monthly payments jump to £1,490 from £863.

"Many simply won't be able to afford this," he said.

Virgin Money confirmed a decision to halt deals for new customers was due to the market conditions.

Both Virgin and Skipton Building Society said submitted applications would still be processed. The lenders also said they would issue a new range of mortgage deals in the coming weeks.

Bank of Ireland said it had "withdrawn all residential and buy to let rates" on Monday, adding that it "will launch new ranges as soon as possible".

Halifax said from Wednesday it would remove mortgage products that come with a fee "as a result of significant changes in mortgage market pricing we've seen over recent weeks".

Mortgage deals which have product fees can result in lower monthly repayments for homeowners, with the fee being added to the total mortgage debt.

But although mortgage rates may be lower per month, the overall cost of the loan will be higher due to more interest accruing over time.

Halifax said it had not changed its mortgage rates and it continued to offer product fee-free options for borrowers.

HSBC said it had no plans to change mortgage offers, while NatWest said its rates were under "continual review in line with market conditions". Nationwide said it had not withdrawn any mortgage deals and will "continue to keep the market under review".

TSB declined to comment.

The statement from the Bank of England came shortly after a separate statement by the Treasury, seemingly intended to reassure investors, laying out a timetable for when more details of the government's plans would be given.

It said cabinet ministers would announce measures to boost growth over the coming weeks and that the chancellor would set out a "medium-term fiscal plan", including measures to reduce the national debt, on 23 November.

It also said the plan would come with a forecast of expected UK growth and government borrowing from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, the omission of which from Friday's mini-budget had drawn criticism.

In government, there is nervousness about talking about what is going on.

And there is nervousness about NOT talking about what is going on.

What does that tell you?

It tells you the government has been a reluctant passenger on this big dipper of market volatility that it strapped itself and the rest of us into.

There appears to be some relief that the markets overnight are not as bumpy.

They think, they hope - and there's a lot of hoping going on - that the double dose of attempted reassurance from the Treasury and the Bank of England on Monday shows a road map without a panic.

But guess what? No sooner had I just said what you've just read on the radio and a minister texted me suggesting this was "too optimistic."

"The impact on mortgage rates of these ill-considered policies will be very damaging. I can't see the pound rising substantially, in fact it feels more likely to drift down further over time if this path is continued."

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2022-09-27 11:05:55Z
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