Noise Cancelling with Neil Woodford

The UK stock market is shrinking, and the FTSE 100 now depends on two buyers: companies buying back their own shares, and overseas bidders. Neil Woodford explains where the third buyer went, why the Financial Times has blamed the wrong thing, and what it means if you own UK shares. UK pension funds used to hold more than half their assets in UK shares. Today it is about 4%. UK equity funds have had 10 straight years of outflows. So when the FT says share buybacks are draining British companies of investment, Neil's answer is that the buyback is a symptom. He names the cause, and the cost to the taxpayer: about £54bn a year.

The Anthropic IPO is weeks away, and its filing shows a business like no other: $17bn of sales in three months, still a loss, and $895bn signed away on computing power. Neil Woodford goes through the numbers and asks who actually keeps the profit from AI. Answering customers' questions is cheap for Anthropic. It keeps about 85 cents of every dollar after paying for the chips and power. So why isn't it making money? Neil and Jon Adair follow the cash: to the next model, to the cloud companies renting out the chips, and to customers through price cuts that cost Anthropic about $600m in a single quarter. Is this the dotcom bubble again? Neil takes on the comparison, and this week's argument between the analysts who say big tech's cash is running out and the investors who say the AI spending has barely started. We also look at why Revolut moved the coding work of about 2,000 engineers onto an open-weight model, and whether the best AI models can hold their price. Then the question everyone is asking about the AI stocks coming to market: would Neil invest in Anthropic? He answers it, explains how he would judge any AI listing, and says where he thinks the profit from AI will land, including why the UK may be better placed than most. Neil's views are his own and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any investment.

Budget 2026 raised the tax on your savings and rental income, on top of a rise already due in April, and the Chancellor barely mentioned it. Neil Woodford explains why John Healey did it, and why he thinks the official forecast that says more tax rises are coming is wrong. From April 2027, interest on savings held outside an ISA and income from rented property will be taxed at 24%, 44% and 49%. A £100 energy payment for 20 million households is paid for by doubling the bank surcharge, and the gas standing charge is moving onto the price of each unit of gas, which could leave the biggest users paying more. Neil and Jon go through what the Budget did to people's money, and what it put off. The bigger question is why the Budget was so small. The tax burden is heading for a post-war record, the Chancellor's margin against his fiscal rules is down to £15bn, and he has ruled out both broad tax rises and deep spending cuts. Growth is the way out, and the OBR forecast says it isn't coming. One number in that forecast is worth roughly three times the Chancellor's whole margin. Neil explains why he thinks the OBR has that number wrong, the contradiction in its interest rate forecast that he calls economically illiterate, and what it all means for savers, the banks and UK shares.

AI stocks sold off hard last week, and the Financial Times called it a dress rehearsal for an AI reckoning. Is the AI bubble about to burst? Neil Woodford thinks the AI boom is only in the foothills, but he has a clear view on who is holding the risk if it doesn't pay for itself. Anthropic's IPO prospectus gave the first look at the finances of a leading AI lab: an $80bn loss in the first half of 2026, and at least $518bn of computing power committed over the next decade, about 80% of which can't be cancelled. That money is revenue for Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It's a big part of why the largest spenders are expected to put around $785bn into data centres and chips this year, and more of it is now being borrowed. Neil and Jon follow the money down the chain, from the AI labs to the cloud companies, the neoclouds and the lenders behind them. They look at why the $80bn loss matters less than the headline suggests, what Meta's latest results say about funding the build-out, and the two threats that could undermine all of it: planning refusals for data centres, and cheap open-weight AI models from China. Then Neil's view: why he thinks AI spending carries on, why it could run slower but for longer, what the telecoms bust of 2000 does and doesn't tell us, and the one part of the AI build-out that worries him most. Finally, what it means for investors, including anyone in an index tracker who may not realise how much of the AI trade they already own.

Does the UK need £35bn of tax rises at the 2026 Budget? The IFS Green Budget says Chancellor John Healey is £35bn short ahead of his first Budget on 28 October. Neil Woodford says the number rests on an interest rate nobody actually forecasts. The Office for Budget Responsibility builds its own forecasts for UK growth, wages and inflation. For interest rates, it takes whatever the bond market happens to be pricing. Jon Adair explains what is really inside a market interest rate, why that price is not the same thing as a forecast, and the place in the IFS report where two different interest rate paths sit side by side. Neil then puts his own numbers on UK growth, inflation, the Bank of England base rate and 10-year gilt yields, and explains why he thinks the OBR, the Bank of England, the IMF and the OECD keep getting the UK economy wrong. Jon puts the hard cases to him: oil above $100 with the Strait of Hormuz still shut, and whether the gilt market would punish a Chancellor who didn't raise taxes. Then what it means for investors: which parts of the UK economy and the UK stock market Neil thinks gain most if he's right, and the one number to check on Budget day before you look at any tax rise. This video is for information only and is not investment advice.

Stamp duty on a typical UK house move has roughly doubled in 20 years without a single rate rise, and the number of homeowners moving house with a mortgage has more than halved. The government's new Your First Home scheme is aimed at first-time buyers. Neil Woodford and Jon Adair show why first-time buyers are the part of the housing market that is working, how frozen stamp duty thresholds and post-crisis deposit rules have stopped existing homeowners moving, and why £1 of stamp duty can cost a family £5 of house. Neil sets out what he would do, whether it would pay for itself, what would prove him wrong, and what it all means for housebuilders and the businesses that depend on people moving. Neil's full analysis The Noise Cancelling app, free on iPhone, iPad and Android This episode is for information and education only. It is not investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. Capital is at risk.

UK gilt yields fell on the day Britain found out it had borrowed £3.5bn more than planned. So what is really setting the cost of UK government borrowing? Neil Woodford and Jon Adair look past the "Truss moment" headlines at what gilt investors are actually pricing: inflation, the oil price and the war in the Gulf. Neil revisits his April call that the Iran war was already over and says what he got wrong. They also cover why UK diesel is heading for £2 a litre, what's behind the fuel shortages in France, and what a settlement in the Gulf would mean for UK inflation, interest rates and the stock market.

Will AI take your job? Anthropic's economic scenarios model says AI could make the US economy 30% bigger by 2030 and put 1 in 5 knowledge workers out of work. Neil Woodford runs the model live and shows who gets the money when AI does the work. In this episode of The Noise Cancelling Podcast, Jon Adair and Neil Woodford break down Anthropic's 2030 AI economy forecast: three scenarios for AI and the economy, what happens to wages and unemployment, why the labour share falls from 60p to 45p in the pound, and what it means for investors, graduates, the UK economy and anyone in knowledge work.

UK inflation is falling while oil is up 35% and gilt yields are at an 18-year high. Neil Woodford explains why the 4-5% inflation forecasts are wrong again, what is actually in the CPI basket, and why the bond market may be pricing the wrong story. The Telegraph says British inflation hits 4-5% by Christmas. The Bank of England, the City and the academic economists said the same thing in March, when oil was $120. July came in at 2.9%, food inflation at 1.3%. In this episode Jon Adair argues the inflation surge case as hard as he can and Neil Woodford takes it apart leg by leg: the energy shock and the price cap, food, second-round effects and wages, and the bond market. Neil puts a number on December inflation and explains why most of it is already written. He covers why gas and electricity are 3% of the basket (half what they were in the 1980s), why 55% of the pump price is tax, why UK pay growth at a six-year low means there is no wage spiral, and why the gilt market is following US Treasury yields rather than a UK inflation problem. Then the bigger question: is this a new inflationary age, or the start of a period of disinflation driven by energy supply, China and AI? And if he's wrong, what happens.

Is the UK's productivity crisis actually real? The ONS has quietly admitted its Labour Force Survey overstated UK employment, and the HMRC tax data tells a completely different story about the UK economy, your taxes and interest rates. In this episode, Neil Woodford explains what the tax records really show about UK productivity, why the official survey invented half a million workers who don't exist, and how one wrong number fed both the OBR forecast that drove Rachel Reeves' tax rises and the Bank of England's view of how fast the economy can grow before rates must stay high. We also get into the collapse in graduate jobs and what it says about AI adoption in the UK, whether Britain's productivity has genuinely accelerated since 2024, and how the UK really compares with the G7. Stay to the end for what a correction means for the November Budget, mortgage rates, gilts and rate-sensitive UK stocks, and where Neil sees the opportunity. Read Neil's full written analysis Neil's first piece on this from 2024