The ONS net migration figures out this morning are the most politically significant domestic number in a while. Annual net migration to the UK fell to 171,000 in the year to December 2025 — roughly half the prior year’s figure and the lowest since 2021. The Home Office separately confirmed that asylum seekers in hotel accommodation stood at 20,885 at end of March, down 35% year-on-year. These numbers will be used by Labour to argue the policy is working, and by critics to argue it hasn’t gone far enough. For anyone watching gilt markets or domestic consumption, the demographic implications of a sustained drop of this magnitude are worth sitting with.

Rachel Reeves is announcing a cost-of-living package today. The headline item is a £100m fare-free bus scheme for children in England this August. The chancellor is explicitly not extending help to energy bills, which the BBC notes is a deliberate decision. Nothing here that moves the macro needle, but it signals the Treasury is still cautious about the fiscal envelope.

Wes Streeting has used his Labour leadership pitch to call for equalising capital gains tax with income tax. He puts the revenue figure at £12bn a year. That’s a meaningful number and the proposal will sharpen the debate about where a post-Reeves Labour party lands on capital taxation. Worth watching if you have domestic equity or property exposure.

SpaceX has filed for what would be the largest IPO in history, trading under SPCX. For the first time the company has opened its books. The filing describes what it calls the largest total addressable market in human history — language that will either prove visionary or embarrassing. The listing is expected to trigger a broader wave of large tech IPOs. Separately, OpenAI is preparing its own IPO filing with Goldman and Morgan Stanley, targeting a listing as early as September at a $1tn valuation. Two of the most consequential private companies in the world moving to public markets in the same window is a significant moment for tech allocators.

Jensen Huang told an audience this week that Nvidia has identified a new $200bn market in CPUs designed specifically for AI agents. He described it as “brand new.” That’s a notable claim from a CEO who has been right about TAM expansion before — and it suggests Nvidia’s ambitions extend well beyond GPUs.

The Iran war continues to generate secondary effects worth tracking. Insurers with exposure to the conflict are under pressure, with The Economist noting some have been “hammered” and others face mounting risk. EasyJet says bookings are coming in later than usual, which it attributes to consumer uncertainty from the conflict rather than any fuel supply issue. The broader wave analysis from Al Jazeera suggests the economic disruption will spread across sectors over years rather than months.

US Q1 earnings season is largely done, but Federal Reserve minutes from the May meeting are due for release this evening UK time.

Sources

BBC News, Guardian, The Economist, Al Jazeera, TechCrunch, FT, Ars Technica, Politico — 2026-05-21