Lend to the government for 100 years? You must be joking

The government is considering issuing bonds with a maturity of 100 years or more. That sounds like a great deal for them, but a terrible deal for investors, says John Stepek.

Less than a week ahead of the Budget, chancellor George Osborne has been given a very clear warning by credit rating agency Fitch. "Keep up the cuts or else".

Fitch has put Britain on negative outlook'. The group warned that the UK could lose its AAA-credit rating if the government fails to stick to its plan and debt ends up "peaking later and higher than currently forecast."

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.