Bobby Dean

First, I associate myself with the comments made by the Leader of the House about the fire in Hong Kong. I have many constituents from Hong Kong who will be thinking about their family and friends. I also note that this is UK Parliament Week. I know you are very actively involved, Mr Speaker, and I thank you for your organisational efforts on that front. It will have been a relief to you, Mr Speaker, to hear the Budget officially delivered on the Floor of the House yesterday. I know that all the leaks over the past few weeks have been a source of frustration, but it did make that long list of taxes a little easier to digest and comprehend. It felt at one point as though almost every section of the economy was getting its own special tax, except of course for those in the banking industry, who, we hear, were popping champagne corks yesterday about avoiding the windfall taxes that the Liberal Democrats were calling for. It just goes to show that all their lobbying efforts have paid off. According to reports, they got away with no new taxes because they are going to be nice about the Budget on behalf of the Chancellor, so let us see if that holds. One under-reported bit of the OBR analysis yesterday—in the final pages of the Blue Book—is the potential danger to the UK economy of a major correction in the global stock market. There has been lots of talk recently about the potential for an AI bubble, with price to earnings ratios being comparable with those of a dotcom bubble. JP Morgan has done an analysis of current valuations and the physical limits to investment because of the need to build data centres and so on, and it thinks we could be up to about $5 trillion of investment by 2030. That means AI products will need to create an additional revenue of $650 billion a year to give a reasonable return to their investors. To put that into context, that is about 150% of the revenue that Apple makes, or the equivalent of about $35 a month for every customer it has in the world. It is my feeling that eventually investors will cotton on to that, and they will choose to moderate their investment. When that correction comes, the OBR thinks that it could affect the UK current deficit by between £15 billion and £26 billion, so will the Leader of House request that a Minister makes a statement about what contingency planning the Treasury is making for that scenario?