“What’s in the box?” – it’s Budget time again

It's that time of year again when the chancellor lays out his public spending plans. John Stepek looks ahead to the Budget speech, and asks what's in the box.

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What's inside Philip Hammond's red box this year?
(Image credit: © 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP)

"What's in the box?"It's an iconic line from seminal 90s video nasty Seven. A youthful Brad Pitt doesn't know exactly what's in the box, but he's pretty sure it has life-ruining implications.

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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.