The Bank of England’s deputy governor Clare Lombardelli said this week that stock markets are overvalued and likely to fall. It’s unusual for a senior BoE figure to be that direct about equity valuations, and it will be read alongside the broader question of whether the bank is building a narrative around financial stability risks as it approaches its next rate decision. Markets will want to know whether this is personal opinion or something closer to institutional guidance.

On the Mandelson vetting row, Cabinet Office permanent secretary Cat Little told MPs that Olly Robbins, the since-sacked Foreign Office head, refused to hand over a summary of Mandelson’s security vetting to the Cabinet Office when it was compiling documents on his US ambassador appointment. Little had to go directly to UK Security Vetting to obtain it. The episode adds to the picture of dysfunction around that appointment and keeps the story alive ahead of the King’s state visit to Washington.

Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s former chief of staff, held talks with Google DeepMind about a project sitting at the intersection of AI and democratic politics. No deal was announced, but the fact that Starmer’s closest political strategist was pitching AI ventures to one of the world’s leading labs while still in or recently out of government will attract scrutiny. The nature of the project isn’t fully clear from reporting, but the optics are uncomfortable for a government already navigating questions about its tech relationships.

In the US, the AI theft story is escalating. The Trump administration has accused China of conducting “industrial-scale” theft of American AI technology, and is reportedly considering significant sanctions. Beijing called it slander. A Trump-Xi summit is in the background here, and any sanctions announcement would complicate that sharply. Worth watching for any Treasury or Commerce Department action in the next week.

On Hormuz, Trump said the US Navy would shoot and kill any boat laying mines in the strait, and claimed the US has total control of the waterway. This follows Iran seizing two container ships. The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, speaking in Cyprus, warned that any nuclear deal without technical experts at the table risks producing something weaker than the original JCPOA. The ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon has been extended by three weeks. Taken together, the Gulf is the live pressure point for energy markets right now.

Indonesia has floated the idea of charging a transit toll on the Malacca Strait. It has raised this before without following through, but given current shipping disruption and the broader pattern of countries reassessing strategic infrastructure leverage, it’s worth keeping on the radar.

US Q1 GDP data is due later today.

Sources

Guardian, Al Jazeera, BBC News, TechCrunch, FT, Politico, Ars Technica, The Economist — 2026-04-24