UK inflation rate falls – Good news?

Concerns that the triple lock system is on its last legs are not new. But while the triple lock’s future has looked tenuous for a while, it has managed to survive the deal between the Conservative Party and the Democratic Union Party.

The Tories had previously planned to get rid of the triple lock – a mechanism to ensure the state pension rises either by the rate of inflation, wage growth, or by 2.5% (whichever is highest) every year – in 2020, replacing it with a double lock (which would remove the 2.5% element). But losing a parliamentary majority has caused the party to make a U-turn (probably because the DUP were strong supporters of the system staying put), and there was no mention of the triple-lock’s abolition in the Queen’s Speech.

A couple of years ago my Bank was taken over by La Caixa.  To be honest, this was one of the easiest changes I have had to deal with in Spain and therefore, in this regard I was lucky.  Especially as the previous bank took 6 months to assess a loan application I had made, to finally arrive at a negative answer. By the time I’d got that answer I’d already made 5 repayments to an obliging bank.  ‘Opeless.

We have seen many banks be swallowed up here in Spain since the crisis and I will remind you, the Spanish banking industry was seen as a fine example at the beginning of the crisis in 2008, because its purposeful structure should have prevented contagion (spreading or transfer of problems of a systemic nature).  Instead, individual institutions took the risk rather than having it spread throughout the industry and that is why some 7 years later we are still seeing takeovers of failed banking businesses. Time has dictated that maybe it wasn’t such a shining light.