C&N punters mount their own U-turn

Yesterday evening, less than two hours after Darling’s commons statement on the tax U-turn I published a chart here under the headline “Darling gives Labour a boost in the Crewe betting“.

This has been picked up in the media and on a number of other sites and presented as an instant verdict on what Brown and Darling did yesterday.

Well after consideration the markets have returned to almost exactly where they were 24 hours ago.

This is probably as a result of the way the media has dealt with Darling’s commons statement. For ministers have had to cope with their own words of only a few weeks ago being played back to them repeatedly. U-turns never look good because it raises question marks about your judgement in the first place.

And this has been picked up by the markets as can be seen above. The chart, itself, shows the changes in the betting odds reflected as an implied probability.

Mike Smithson