Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
The United Kingdom is about to discover the part of the Laffer Curve where the billionaire taxpayers simply get on a plane and go somewhere else.
His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has now assigned a dedicated “compliance manager” to every billionaire it has identified with a UK tax footprint, dramatically expanding the government’s oversight of the country’s richest people, according to a new report from Bloomberg this week.
HMRC is using its own records, public information and data shared by foreign governments to identify billionaires with UK tax exposure and map their connections to businesses, trusts and other entities. “The UK tax authority has assigned a personal compliance manager to every billionaire within its reach as it seeks to get a better grip on the super-rich’s tax liabilities,” the report says.
HMRC says the goal is straightforward, making sure wealthy taxpayers pay what they legally owe, and the government confirmed this month that every billionaire with a UK tax footprint was allocated a Customer Compliance Manager over the summer.
But consider the message Britain is sending: become extraordinarily successful, build companies, accumulate enough capital and pay enough taxes, and eventually the government assigns an individual bureaucrat to keep tabs on you.
At some point, you have to wonder whether the people designing these policies understand that billionaires are among the most geographically mobile people on Earth. They literally are the most mobile people on the planet. They don’t have to stay.
And they won’t. They can live in Dubai. They can establish themselves in Monaco. They can move to Malta or Switzerland or any number of jurisdictions competing aggressively for wealthy residents, investors and entrepreneurs. Their businesses, capital and families are often international already. Moving is inconvenient, but for someone worth several billion dollars it is hardly an insurmountable obstacle.
In my mind this is what British billionaires do in Monte CarloAnd Britain isn’t exactly starting from zero here. The country abolished its longstanding non-dom tax regime in April 2025, and several prominent billionaires, including hedge-fund manager Chris Rokos, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and businessman Nassef Sawiris, have subsequently left the UK. Billionaire Betfred founder Fred Done, whose family reportedly paid roughly £400 million in taxes last year, recently warned that Britain’s increasingly hostile tax environment is pushing wealthy people and businesses elsewhere.
Now imagine you’re another billionaire watching this unfold. You’ve watched other wealthy residents leave. And now you’re informed that the tax authority has effectively assigned someone specifically to understand your finances, behavior, tax returns and potential compliance risks.
HMRC describes these managers in considerably friendlier language, but its own explanation is revealing. Customer Compliance Managers are tasked with developing an “in-depth understanding” of wealthy taxpayers’ finances and behavior, reviewing their returns alongside intelligence gathered both inside and outside Britain, and challenging taxpayers where HMRC believes the correct amount isn’t being paid.
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Of course billionaires should pay every pound of tax they legally owe. Tax fraud should be prosecuted whether the person committing it has £10,000 or £10 billion.
But there is a meaningful difference between enforcing the tax code and designing an enforcement apparatus around a specific class of people simply because they possess extraordinary wealth. HMRC says the allocation reflects wealth, complexity and risk, and supporters will reasonably argue that complicated international fortunes require more specialized oversight.
My concern is what happens when that philosophy becomes cumulative. Higher taxes. The destruction of preferential regimes intended to attract international wealth. Ever-more aggressive information gathering. There is a point where taxation starts feeling less like collecting revenue and more like abusing success. In the U.S. New York City is turning into a prime example of this.
But unlike ordinary taxpayers, the people being targeted have an escape hatch.
Watch what happens next. I suspect Britain is going to discover that there is a practical limit to how much scrutiny and taxation governments can pile onto extremely mobile capital before that capital simply leaves. Dubai, Monaco, Malta and other wealth-friendly jurisdictions don’t need to persuade every billionaire in Britain to relocate. They only need to make the alternative sufficiently attractive. And it is.
The irony is that driving away even a relatively small number of enormously wealthy taxpayers can undermine the entire exercise.
Britain’s wealthy population generated an estimated £95 billion in PAYE and National Insurance receipts and another £65 billion in other taxes in 2025-26, although those figures cover HMRC’s much broader definition of “wealthy” rather than billionaires specifically.
Governments have a habit of treating wealthy taxpayers like permanent entries on a spreadsheet: raise the tax liability, multiply it by the same number of taxpayers, and assume the resulting revenue simply appears.
But people don’t stay frozen in spreadsheet cells forever. When the cost of remaining in a jurisdiction rises enough, behavior changes. People restructure their finances, move assets, alter investment decisions or, particularly at the very top of the wealth distribution, simply leave.
It’s about as basic a concept as you can get when discussing taxation: changing the tax rate can also change the tax base. Yet fiscal projections can make it look as though the people being taxed will sit still indefinitely while their liabilities keep rising.
As New York City's Mamdani has just learned the hard way, billionaires, in particular, have an unusual ability to respond to those incentives…sometimes from a private jet. Britain may soon find this out.
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Tyler Durden Wed, 09/23/2026 - 08:05
Brent crude slipped below $99 a barrel, falling as low as $97.77 in the overnight hours, as renewed US-Iran diplomacy and prospects for restored Saudi oil exports eased supply concerns. But as Goldman Sachs energy experts warned on Tuesday, the global refining nightmare will persist through next year.
The benchmark has slipped nearly 11% since mid-month after topping out around $109.65. Reports this week of a partial restart of Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline and Asian buyers being slated to resume cargo loadings at Yanbu offered some relief to a tight physical market.
Full East-West pipeline repairs could take as long as two months, according to local reports. Even limited operations would ease the immediate supply squeeze.
President Trump said US officials held "very good" talks with Iranian representatives at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.
Special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner participated in the three-hour talks with their Iranian counterparts on the sidelines of UNGA.
"I feel very good right now," Witkoff said after the meeting. He wrote on X late Tuesday that the US hopes the talks "will prove constructive and promising" and the mediators will continue their work.
UBS energy specialist Dominic Ellis provided clients with a full view of what's driving energy markets so far this week:
Brent is below $99/bbl, down about 3.8% from Tuesday's high and down under 10% from the $109/bbl hit early last week, as evidence emerged of debottlenecking of Middle East oil exports and of diplomatic progress between the US and Iran.
Saudi Arabia said that flows via the East-West pipeline could partially restart in coming days, and that exports from the port of Yanbu would also restart soon. Full repairs to the pipeline could take up to 8 weeks according to press reports, but even a partial restart would alleviate some of the immediate tightness in oil markets.
Meanwhile, Iran acknowledged that there had been discussions with the US via intermediaries on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, and said it had shared conditions for a restart of transit via the Strait of Hormuz, which it said could happen in 7 days if conditions were met. President Trump called US talks with Iranian envoys "very good".
Cynics will note that similar comments from the US in the recent past have not resulted in meaningful progress towards diplomatic goals, and that the US has already rejected calls for an immediate end to its blockade of Iran – one of Iran's preconditions for an easing of restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz.
Still, the fact that talks are taking place at all is a development which cannot be ignored, and which is likely to keep downward pressure on oil prices until there is evidence that progress has stalled. On the other hand, a breakthrough in talks could push Brent back into the $80s fairly quickly.
The desk's base case is that the US has a strong incentive to rely on the "carrot" rather than the "stick" in the period leading up to midterm elections in November.
Reports on Tuesday that President Trump has made comments supportive of a US diesel export ban (despite Interior Secretary Burgum's statement last week that a ban would not likely have the desired effect) show he is growing concerned about elevated fuel prices in the US, and a focus on diplomacy with Iran may be the easiest way to bring oil and refined product prices down in the near term.
In the medium term, however, Iranian conditions are not likely to be acceptable to the US, and we would not be surprised at a return to the low-level conflict we’ve seen over the last month.
Crude's retreat from triple digit territory is easing pressure at the pump, with AAA data showing the national average for regular gasoline slipping to $4.474 a gallon on Wednesday. But after a 9.3% surge this month, a modest pullback offers limited political relief for the Trump administration. Prices remain well above the politically sensitive $4 threshold, leaving the White House under pressure to turn diplomatic progress into a concrete deal.
Refer back to Goldman energy analyst Nikhil Bhandari's Tuesday note about the prolonged refining crisis and what it means for gas and diesel prices in 2027 (read here).
Tyler Durden Wed, 09/23/2026 - 07:45Since the early days of the US-Iran conflict, we have tracked the rewiring of global energy flows. That theme continues today and is accelerating as LNG buyers seek supplies and shipping routes well beyond the Gulf. Before the conflict, roughly one-fifth of global LNG trade transited through the Strait of Hormuz, concentrating risk at a single chokepoint. That vulnerability is now driving buyers to rejigger supply networks.
At last week's Gastech annual conference and exhibition for natural gas and LNG in Bangkok, Thailand, Reuters cited energy executives, government officials, buyers, traders and investors who discussed the urgency of securing new supplies from conflict-free areas, largely because the Hormuz chokepoint has become a major liability.
Asian governments are pursuing longer-term supply security, while producers and trading houses are broadening their supply networks to include safer regions worldwide.
"A lot of governments are thinking not just diversification of the suppliers, but diversification of supply routes," Sue-Ern Tan, the head of the International Energy Agency's regional cooperation center in Singapore, said at Gastech.
Bangladesh, which previously relied on Qatar for most of its LNG imports, is searching for new supplies in Indonesia, Australia and China. Earlier this year, buyers including PetroChina and India's GAIL secured replacement cargoes outside the Gulf region.
The search for alternatives could support emerging producers including Argentina, East Timor and Tanzania, broadening investment beyond the US and Qatar, which dominate LNG exports.
Thailand's state-controlled energy group, PTT, is now exploring supplies from Oman, North America and West Africa. Its trading arm recently signed a long-term deal with Norway's Equinor.
Also at Gastech, Shell executive Tom Summers said new capacity had largely offset the loss of 36 million metric tons of Gulf supply, leaving a net global shortfall this year of about 5 million tons, or 1% to 1.5% of supply.
Takayuki Ueda, CEO of Japanese energy firm Inpex, said that companies were focused on "portfolio resilience, portfolio diversification, diversification of supply sources, and also security for the entire supply chain."
Paul Marsden, president of engineering firm Bechtel, expects new supplies from East Africa, including projects involving companies such as ExxonMobil.
The latest EIA figures show that US LNG exports surged, averaging 17.4 billion cubic feet per day in the first half of 2026, up 23% from a year earlier. US exporters are helping replace disrupted Gulf supplies as the waters in the Gulf of America remain calm and commercial maritime traffic remains stable.
Tyler Durden Wed, 09/23/2026 - 06:55Authored by Zachary Skidmore via Data Centre Dynamics,
The European Commission (EC) has submitted a proposal to require data centers across Europe to disclose their energy and water efficiency metrics.
The European Union (EU) aims to triple its data center capacity over the next five to seven years.
This has raised concerns about the build-out's potential impact on the power grid and natural resource use.
The proposed rules would create a common rating scheme covering data centers with a capacity exceeding 500kW. The scheme would also cover data centers' support for grid balancing services, contributions to waste heat recovery, and use of renewable energy generation.
In support of the proposal, the EC has also launched a call for evidence and public consultation on minimum performance standards for data centers in Europe. The consultation will close in December.
The proposal is now subject to a two-month scrutiny period by the European Parliament and the Council before entering into force. This gives co-legislators the opportunity to object to the proposal, but not to propose amendments.
The first ratings from the scheme are expected sometime in 2027.
A first review is expected to follow by the end of 2028.
European officials have launched several projects to support the bloc's energy system in meeting the demands from the data center sector. In June, the EU launched two initiatives to that effect. The first seeks to bring together a range of stakeholders, including data center developers, energy companies, and public authorities, to integrate data centers into the EU energy system. The second, dubbed the AI grids project, seeks to develop the first pan-European AI foundation model for electricity grids.
The rules came shortly after reports emerged that several of the largest data center operators were accused of using a secrecy provision in EU law to block public access to crucial information about the environmental impact of their data centers.
Data centers are projected to grow exponentially across the European market, forecast to rise from approximately 9.2GW at present to more than 17GW in 2030, much of which is driven by AI. As a result, emissions emanating from the sector are also expected to skyrocket, especially with the data center size also increasing significantly.
The lack of reporting regarding the impact of individual data centers could seriously curtail the ability of independent bodies to scrutinize their impact, potentially impacting the EU's capacity to meet carbon reduction targets.
Tyler Durden Wed, 09/23/2026 - 06:30