Category
Freedom
Where personal finance meets politics, history, and the long arc of who actually owns the country.
"Freedom isn't free" is the site's thesis: financial independence is not just a maths problem. Knowing how to invest matters, but so does understanding who controls the rules of the wrapper your money sits in, which way state policy is leaning, and what the historical pattern looks like when governments run out of options.
These pieces are longer, more argumentative, and less how-to than the rest of the site. Some are historical (how debt felled the British Empire, the case for a UK sovereign wealth fund). Some are forward-looking (AI and the labour market, the auto-enrolment story). All of them assume you're the kind of reader who wants to know the political weather as well as the index fund.
19 articles
Showing 1-10
What Is the IMF? Power, History and Criticism
In 1976 the IMF effectively rewrote the UK budget. It still grades Britain's economy every year, and a single country holds a veto over the whole institution. Here's who really runs it.
Generational Wealth: Why £100k at 25 Beats £500k at 60
The inheritance you leave will arrive in the wrong decade. By 60 your kids have a paid-off house and a vague relief. The decade it would have changed their lives is long gone.
Rent, Profit, Interest: Are They All the Same Thing?
Gary Stevenson says rent, profit and interest are the same flow of money in three legal costumes. He is more right than most of personal finance is comfortable admitting.
What Is GDP? Why Per Capita Is the Number That Counts
Your stagnant wages are not bad luck. UK output per person has barely moved since 2008. The US is now 30-40% ahead on the only GDP number that touches your salary.
Gary Stevenson's Wealth Tax: The Missing Manifesto
A Citi trader spent his twenties betting against the economy he grew up in and won. Now he's on the BBC arguing Britain needs a wealth tax. The bit of his case that doesn't land.
UK Productivity Stagnation: The Puzzle Since 2008
UK productivity grew at 2% a year for 40 years. Then in 2008 it just stopped. Almost every personal finance frustration since traces back to that single broken line on the chart.
What Is a K-Shaped Recovery? V, U, L and K Compared
After 2020, UK house prices and the FTSE 100 went up 25%. Real wages for the bottom half went the other way. Two arms, one chart. Which one you sit on changes everything.
What Is Late-Stage Capitalism? Meaning and UK Impact
'Late-stage capitalism' is now a meme. The original economists meant something specific, and the modern version describes a UK most personal finance writers refuse to acknowledge.
Why Boomers Had It Easier in the UK: The Numbers
House price ratios were 3.5x earnings in the 1970s. They are 8-9x today. The honest comparison is harder for both camps in the row to accept than either of them lets on.
AI and the Economy: Why You Are Not a Horse
Cars replaced horses. AI will replace you. There's one flaw in that argument: horses were never consumers. You are. And AI might be the first machine that is too.