Donald Trump has not announced who will be the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chancellor of the American Treasury.
It was an important appointment and Trump took his time. He was spoiled for choice. There are four front-runners, all with impressive backgrounds in high finance.
The joint favorites are Scott Bessent, a successful hedge fund manager and founder, CEO and chief investment officer of Wall Street firms, and Howard Lutnick, the billionaire boss of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
Also in the mix are Kevin Walsh, former Federal Reserve governor and adviser to President George W Bush, and another Wall Street billionaire, Marc Rowan.
Does anyone believe that if they were American, Chancellor Martha Reeves herself would even get an interview, let alone make a cut?
He’d be lucky to get a job making coffee at the White House.
When Reeves was appointed by Keir Starmer, we were told that he was a qualified ‘economist’ who had worked for the Bank of England for ten years.
Turned out he also has somewhat, er, economy with actualite.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves at a Mansion House dinner in the City of London last week
When she campaigned for parliament in 2009, her website said: ‘Rachel has spent her professional career as an economist working for the Bank of England, the British Embassy in Washington and the Halifax Bank of Scotland.’
Or not, as it were.
This week, his online profile changed from ‘economist’ to simply saying he works in ‘retail banking’.
Now seemingly away from planning and decision-making at the Bank of England, he spent six years there – not ten, as previously mentioned – studying. Sounds to me like she’s more of a graduate trainee or honorable girl work experience.
Two sugars, please, love.
From Threadneedle Street he moved to Leeds, where his CV again claimed he was an economist for the Bank of Scotland, aka HBOS.
He has since worked in the complaints department at the former Halifax Building Society before joining BOS.
He was also involved in the retail mortgage division at HBOS when it was the second biggest bank to collapse in UK history and had to be bailed out by Lloyds.
So it’s not exactly a glittering career in high finance as we believe. But now the Hon Member for Fantasy Island is in charge of the country’s finances.
As I said a few months ago, when it first appeared that her CV was a work of fiction up there with Harry Potter, it made Martha Chancellor seem like she was putting me at the head of WH Smith because I once had a round of paper. .
If we want someone from Halifax, we’d better choose Howard, the bounced bank clerk from Birmingham who rose to fame as the face of the popular Get A Little Xtra Help commercials on television a few years ago.
I can’t imagine Martha dancing down the street to a chorus line of happy Halifax customers. He is more likely to be chased down the block by pensioners angry at his decision to pay a £300 winter fuel charge, especially as it has been revealed he claimed £4,400 for his own domestic heating bill for a former member of Parliament.
His personal financial records are also flawless. For example, in 2015, the House of Commons credit card was officially suspended after spending more than £4,000 in ‘unauthorised’ charges.
And although Reeves and his wife had a combined pre-election income of around £200,000 a year, she received £7,500 from a friend to buy the skirt.
It later emerged that he also enjoyed a free family holiday in Cornwall, worth £1,400, which he had not properly declared to Parliamentary watchdogs.
Not only that. Last year, she published a book aimed at enhancing her credentials, called The Women Who Made Modern Economics. An investigation by the Financial Times found that it was a cut-and-paste job. He has downloaded some unrecognized material from the internet, including the unreliable Wikipedia.
(Full disclosure: I just cut-and-pasted that last paragraph from a column I wrote in September. But most of it is all my own work.)
Why should we believe the words this woman says? We’ve had to listen ad nauseum to him droning on about the £22 billion ‘black hole’ he inherited from the Tories and pretending to know nothing – even though the books are there for all to scrutinize.
Reeves went on to complain that the economy was worse than at any time since World War II – a claim that anyone with a financial background would disparage.
He insisted on talking about the UK’s economic prospects, which would be a self-fulfilling prophecy unless he stopped. Who wants to invest in a country where the Chancellor himself pretends to be a seller?
Giving Reeves the key to Number 11 is like putting Del Boy’s Uncle Albert in charge of the Admiralty.
Meanwhile, as Trump prepares to Make America Great Again, turbocharge the US economy with tax cuts and put one of the Masters Of The Universe in charge of the Treasury, we’re confused by the girl with work experience who used to answer the phone. on the Halifax complaints hotline.
We’re going to need all the Xtra help we can get.
