Anyone who has been through a network file check knows how it works. Someone picks a sample, maybe ten cases, maybe twenty, and reads them properly. The fact find, the research, the suitability letter, the file notes. If those hold up, you get a clean report and everyone goes back to work. Most of the […]

When the FT broke the story of the government’s new Your First Home scheme, some of its readers didn’t hold back. “Insanity,” wrote one in the comments. “Absolute madness,” wrote another, “the market is slowly correcting”. I can see why. Prices are falling in real terms in parts of the country and in cash terms […]

A friend of Anne Boden’s asked Meta’s new AI assistant, Muse, to get her some vanilla ice cream. It found some on Deliveroo and sent her a link so she could pay for it. Boden, who founded Starling Bank, tells the story in the FT this week, and she isn’t impressed. “That’s not an autonomous […]

Someone asks how much they can afford to overpay on their mortgage. You look at their income and outgoings, work out what’s genuinely spare, and give them a figure along with how you got there. The arithmetic holds up. A decent spreadsheet would have produced the same number. According to the people who built the […]

In 1833 Parliament appointed Britain’s first factory inspectors. There were four of them, and between them they were supposed to police conditions in around 4,000 mills. Unsurprisingly, the law they were enforcing was widely evaded. Those four men still mattered more than most of the legislation that came before them. Parliament had already passed laws […]

At the 2007 peak, half the money lent on UK homes had no evidenced income. The lending that broke then has largely gone, so if the AI boom turns, the pressure would arrive another way.

AI, AI, AI. Everyone keeps talking about it. Alright, great! AI! But is it usable without running afoul of the regulations? The AI tools of today did not exist when

Bill Gates spent a few days recently with his two granddaughters, aged three and one. What stayed with him afterwards was a question that really vexed him. What is education actually going to be for, by the time those two are old enough to need it? Gates published an essay in late August called “A […]

In the spring of 1992, Steve Jobs stood in front of a lecture hall of MIT Sloan students and opened his talk not with a product demo, not with the NeXT story, but with someone else’s book. The full recording sits on MIT’s official YouTube channel, and about three and a half minutes in, Jobs […]