The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

An overwhelming number of countries have some kind of national day,

a celebration of their founding or independence or the overthrow of tyranny.

In Australia, the celebrations have been getting increasingly fraught, and now they're getting political. And we'd like to introduce you to Archive 1945. It's a new interactive

series that sifts through the annals of the Economist and revived the history of 80 years ago,

when the Second World War was starting to come to a dramatic close.

First up though.

We did it!

When Britain's Labour Party won in last summer's election, optimism abounded.

I don't have to tell you that the previous few years had been economically tricky, and growth has been sickly for nearly two decades.

The hoped for savior came in the form of Rachel Reeves, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Now a bit more than 200 days into the new

Labor government, the optimism has faded. Growth has gone nowhere and just about nobody liked

what was in Ms. Reeves' little red box of plans

presented in October. This budget raises taxes by £40 billion. Investors are reading the

room. A sell-off in bonds ramped up. In the first days of this year, it spiked. Yields on long-dated

British government bonds are at their highest in decades.

That's put government finances under pressure.

So when Ms. Reeves landed in Davos for the World Economic Forum to hobnob with the Wall

Streeter's and asset managers and pension funders, a tough sales job lay ahead.

...