Your Sunday Briefing: Truss Faces the Music at Tory Conference

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Hello again.

The big conference: The Conservative Party annual gathering is looking more like carnage than celebration for Liz Truss weeks after she was elected leader. If you listen very carefully, you’ll hear the sound of knives being sharpened, and as Martin Ivens explains for Bloomberg Opinion, she and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng now have targets painted clearly on their backs. Truss’s party is tanking in the polls even before her core voters absorb the impact of her policies, David Goodman and Andrew Atkinson write. She appeared on telly Sunday morning to defend her fiscal plans (again) but placed the blame for cutting the top rate of income tax on her finance minister.

The big market thought: Investors are seeing pockets of safety in the biggest UK exporters such as GSK, Shell and British American Tobacco. Others say buy the cheapest stocks that have fallen the most, which might include banks, homebuilders and retailers, Joe Easton writes. The turbulence in the gilt market might not be over either, with pension funds still buying up as many long-dated bonds as they can.The other big gathering: OPEC+ holds its first in-person meeting since March 2020 as the cartel weighs cutting oil production to stem a recent slump in prices. The unexpected IRL gathering could indicate a bigger output cut is on the cards with some delegates flagging a million barrels a day could be on the block. Another unknown: whether Russia, a hefty part of the “plus” in OPEC+, will send anyone.

The big vote: Brazilians could soon have a new leader. Former leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has consistently led his rival, incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and polls on the eve of the vote show Lula potentially gaining the 50% support needed to avoid a runoff. Join Bloomberg on Sunday afternoon, where we’ll be covering the election results in real time. And for anyone looking to trade the results, here’s a handy guide on where you can place your first trades.

The big opinion: Matthew Brooker offers the perspective that living in Blighty might not be so bad, depending on where you’re coming from. Having recently moved back from Hong Kong, he’s finding daily life is normal and people good-natured and helpful.

ICYM our Big Take: The UK’s financial turmoil may be coming to a head but it’s really a crisis that was years in the making. And unless the Truss government does something to restore its credibility with investors, homeowners and businesses will have to pay the price.

And finally, Kwarteng has been all over the press since his mini-budget tanked the pound. But that didn’t stop the Daily Mirror from using a picture of a Black banker on its website. Kwarteng himself, Britain’s first Black chancellor, pointed out the error on Twitter, prompting an apology from the tabloid.

Oh, one more thing. Have a listen to the new Bloomberg Crypto podcast. Jamie Coutts at Bloomberg Intelligence gives his take on the outlook and why, as seems to happen every September, crypto had such a hard time of it last month.

Have a good week. See you on the other side.

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