Hello! Welcome to the Skundals episode. Oh, it's late money. Your guys are the business and finance needs of the week. I am Phil Examin of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck, also of Axios. Hello. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires. Hello.

And we are here to talk German scandal. We have the one and only Dan McCram. Welcome, Dan. Thank you. Hello. Dan, you are the correct investigative journalist at the Financial Times.

You have an investigation coming out very soon, which we are all desperate to find out what it is. But we can't quite let go of the last one, which was Wirecard, which was this huge thing. It became a book, which you've written. What's the name of the book?

Money men. It became a movie that you star in. What's the name of the movie?

Scandal. Bringing down Wirecard. It's all fun. So we're going to talk about all of that and conspiracy rules and red string. We are going to talk about 10-year-old artists. We are, of course, going to talk about the UK and the way it is melting down because you are right there in the UK. It's all coming up on slate money.

So, Dan, you are in the UK this week. You are bundled up in layers of clothes because you're not turning on your thermostat from across the pond over here. It all looks kind of catastrophic. Is it catastrophic of things going very, very badly over there?

It does feel like we've had somewhat of an accident, which didn't happen on a scale from like one to 10. How bad was this accident?

It was pretty bad. I mean, I'm going to say it was 65 billion. 65 billion is how bad it was.

And it's also so bad because it was entirely unforced. You're used to in the context of enormous central bank bailouts. They're being some sort of proximate and slow burning course.

You know, maybe there is a little bit about it. The UK hasn't been on a great track for a while. But to have the Chancellor of the Exchequer stand up and make a bunch of announcements, which basically send bomb markets into a tailspin, that's quite unusual.

And so, we've had people telling the Financial Times this week that we were pretty close to pension funds failing because they couldn't meet margin calls.

And that is kind of crazy. And I say there's not just as someone who is suddenly looking at the mortgage bill going up by a quarter each month.

Yeah. Okay. So the first thing, there are so many different things going on here, which I think Americans don't entirely understand. And it's worth unpacking.

The news here is that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is this wonderfully old-fashioned name by which the Brits refer to their Finance Minister.

There's a new Chancellor. His name is Quasi Quarten. He's been the Finance Minister for what, like, a few days.

About 10 minutes.

Yeah. And we also obviously have this new Prime Minister, Liz Dress, and the two of them, basically the first big thing they did was come out with this weird mini budget in the...

Where the time when you're not actually meant to be conducting much fiscal policy, but they did this emergency thing.

And announced they were going to have a massive tax cut and massively increased government borrowing at a point when inflation was running very hot already.

And they were going to do all of this fiscal stimulus, which seemed like a really bad idea.

Oh, and Quasi Quarten fired the chief civil servant at the Treasury.

Basically saying, I've got this chap, so I don't want to listen to any experts.

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