The Milburn review, published this morning, lands awkwardly for the government. The headline finding is that the National Living Wage increase has made employers less willing to take on young people, contributing to the rise in under-25s not in employment, education or training. That directly complicates the Treasury’s position — the wage floor was supposed to be a pro-worker win, and now a government-commissioned report is pointing to it as a hiring deterrent. Expect some difficult questions for Reeves and Bridget Phillipson today.

On Iran, the situation is deteriorating faster than the ceasefire framing suggests. US forces shot down Iranian drones, Iran retaliated against an American base, and Tehran is simultaneously showcasing a new air defence system. Trump said publicly that rising economic costs won’t push him into a deal, which removes one of the main assumptions underpinning the recent oil price softness. If that diplomatic channel is genuinely cooling, the oil market may have got ahead of itself.

The rouble has hit a three-year high, driven by energy export revenues, and it is now squeezing the competitiveness of Russian non-energy exports. That is an unusual pressure point in the war economy — a strong currency is normally good news, but for a sanctions-constrained state running a wartime industrial base it creates real friction. Worth watching alongside the FT’s separate piece on Ukraine’s drone production scaling up, which together suggest the battlefield economics are shifting.

On US fiscal risk, there is a piece arguing that long-term Treasuries look expensive given the combination of defence spending, domestic stimulus, and dollar hegemony under pressure. Not a new thesis, but the Iran escalation and the absence of a near-term deal give it fresh relevance for anyone holding duration.

The Google insider trading case is notable beyond the headline. A Google engineer allegedly used knowledge of the company’s internal “Year in Search” data to place over $2.7 million in wagers on Polymarket, netting $1.2 million. It is the clearest case yet of prediction market manipulation using corporate information, and it will sharpen regulatory scrutiny of how these platforms interact with insider trading law — relevant for any firm that has employees active on these markets.

The new SSD timing attack reported by Ars Technica is worth flagging for anyone in financial services with a security function. Researchers have demonstrated that JavaScript running in a browser can infer user activity by measuring SSD read/write patterns, creating a new passive fingerprinting and surveillance vector that bypasses standard cookie and tracking protections.

US Q1 GDP second estimate is due tomorrow, Friday 29th May.

Sources

BBC News, Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Economist, FT, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Politico — 2026-05-28