Get straight to the good stuff every day with the Multiply Minute; a lightning-quick round-up of the money news and how it affects you.
For the first time ever the price of oil in the US dipped below $0 yesterday. How? Oil is traded on its future price, and with vanishing demand and nowhere to store it, traders were willing to pay people to take it off their hands. Oil does still have value (and we’ll still have to pay to fill up our cars) because the price of Brent crude - the international benchmark - is still at around $25.
The government might need to borrow £300 billion this year to cover the cost of its coronavirus measures. The figure comes from thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and includes all recently announced spending. The government will need to borrow to pay for support such as the job retention scheme, and to cover its own lost income as it’s expecting to collect £130 billion less in tax.
Despite the government’s efforts, people’s perceived job security has plunged to its lowest level since the nationwide survey began in 2009. The household finance index, another measure which looks at people’s overall perceptions of wellbeing, fell from 42.5 in March to 34.9 in April.
In bittersweet news, the employment rate had hit an all-time high just before everyone was sent home. According to the Office for National Statistics, 76.6% of people aged 16 to 64 were in paid work in the three months leading up to February. That’s a record high.
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