Noise Cancelling with Neil Woodford

AI stocks sold off hard last week, and the Financial Times called it a dress rehearsal for an AI reckoning. Is the AI bubble about to burst? Neil Woodford thinks the AI boom is only in the foothills, but he has a clear view on who is holding the risk if it doesn't pay for itself.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus gave the first look at the finances of a leading AI lab: an $80bn loss in the first half of 2026, and at least $518bn of computing power committed over the next decade, about 80% of which can't be cancelled. That money is revenue for Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It's a big part of why the largest spenders are expected to put around $785bn into data centres and chips this year, and more of it is now being borrowed.
Neil and Jon follow the money down the chain, from the AI labs to the cloud companies, the neoclouds and the lenders behind them. They look at why the $80bn loss matters less than the headline suggests, what Meta's latest results say about funding the build-out, and the two threats that could undermine all of it: planning refusals for data centres, and cheap open-weight AI models from China.
Then Neil's view: why he thinks AI spending carries on, why it could run slower but for longer, what the telecoms bust of 2000 does and doesn't tell us, and the one part of the AI build-out that worries him most. Finally, what it means for investors, including anyone in an index tracker who may not realise how much of the AI trade they already own.

Does the UK need £35bn of tax rises at the 2026 Budget? The IFS Green Budget says Chancellor John Healey is £35bn short ahead of his first Budget on 28 October. Neil Woodford says the number rests on an interest rate nobody actually forecasts.
The Office for Budget Responsibility builds its own forecasts for UK growth, wages and inflation. For interest rates, it takes whatever the bond market happens to be pricing. Jon Adair explains what is really inside a market interest rate, why that price is not the same thing as a forecast, and the place in the IFS report where two different interest rate paths sit side by side.
Neil then puts his own numbers on UK growth, inflation, the Bank of England base rate and 10-year gilt yields, and explains why he thinks the OBR, the Bank of England, the IMF and the OECD keep getting the UK economy wrong. Jon puts the hard cases to him: oil above $100 with the Strait of Hormuz still shut, and whether the gilt market would punish a Chancellor who didn't raise taxes.
Then what it means for investors: which parts of the UK economy and the UK stock market Neil thinks gain most if he's right, and the one number to check on Budget day before you look at any tax rise.
This video is for information only and is not investment advice.

Stamp duty on a typical UK house move has roughly doubled in 20 years without a single rate rise, and the number of homeowners moving house with a mortgage has more than halved.
The government's new Your First Home scheme is aimed at first-time buyers. Neil Woodford and Jon Adair show why first-time buyers are the part of the housing market that is working, how frozen stamp duty thresholds and post-crisis deposit rules have stopped existing homeowners moving, and why £1 of stamp duty can cost a family £5 of house. Neil sets out what he would do, whether it would pay for itself, what would prove him wrong, and what it all means for housebuilders and the businesses that depend on people moving.
Neil's full analysis
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This episode is for information and education only. It is not investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. Capital is at risk.

UK gilt yields fell on the day Britain found out it had borrowed £3.5bn more than planned. So what is really setting the cost of UK government borrowing?
Neil Woodford and Jon Adair look past the "Truss moment" headlines at what gilt investors are actually pricing: inflation, the oil price and the war in the Gulf. Neil revisits his April call that the Iran war was already over and says what he got wrong. They also cover why UK diesel is heading for £2 a litre, what's behind the fuel shortages in France, and what a settlement in the Gulf would mean for UK inflation, interest rates and the stock market.

Will AI take your job? Anthropic's economic scenarios model says AI could make the US economy 30% bigger by 2030 and put 1 in 5 knowledge workers out of work. Neil Woodford runs the model live and shows who gets the money when AI does the work.
In this episode of The Noise Cancelling Podcast, Jon Adair and Neil Woodford break down Anthropic's 2030 AI economy forecast: three scenarios for AI and the economy, what happens to wages and unemployment, why the labour share falls from 60p to 45p in the pound, and what it means for investors, graduates, the UK economy and anyone in knowledge work.

UK inflation is falling while oil is up 35% and gilt yields are at an 18-year high. Neil Woodford explains why the 4-5% inflation forecasts are wrong again, what is actually in the CPI basket, and why the bond market may be pricing the wrong story.
The Telegraph says British inflation hits 4-5% by Christmas. The Bank of England, the City and the academic economists said the same thing in March, when oil was $120. July came in at 2.9%, food inflation at 1.3%. In this episode Jon Adair argues the inflation surge case as hard as he can and Neil Woodford takes it apart leg by leg: the energy shock and the price cap, food, second-round effects and wages, and the bond market.
Neil puts a number on December inflation and explains why most of it is already written. He covers why gas and electricity are 3% of the basket (half what they were in the 1980s), why 55% of the pump price is tax, why UK pay growth at a six-year low means there is no wage spiral, and why the gilt market is following US Treasury yields rather than a UK inflation problem. Then the bigger question: is this a new inflationary age, or the start of a period of disinflation driven by energy supply, China and AI? And if he's wrong, what happens.

Is the UK's productivity crisis actually real? The ONS has quietly admitted its Labour Force Survey overstated UK employment, and the HMRC tax data tells a completely different story about the UK economy, your taxes and interest rates.
In this episode, Neil Woodford explains what the tax records really show about UK productivity, why the official survey invented half a million workers who don't exist, and how one wrong number fed both the OBR forecast that drove Rachel Reeves' tax rises and the Bank of England's view of how fast the economy can grow before rates must stay high.
We also get into the collapse in graduate jobs and what it says about AI adoption in the UK, whether Britain's productivity has genuinely accelerated since 2024, and how the UK really compares with the G7. Stay to the end for what a correction means for the November Budget, mortgage rates, gilts and rate-sensitive UK stocks, and where Neil sees the opportunity.
Read Neil's full written analysis
Neil's first piece on this from 2024

Neil Woodford has been answering questions about investing for 35 years – and every one of them comes down to seven decisions. In part one of this three-part series, Neil and Jon Adair cover the funnel: the three decisions that take you from every company in the world down to a shortlist worth owning.
You'll learn why reported profit tells you almost nothing about whether a business is any good, the only three numbers Neil would keep if forced to choose (PE, debt to EBITDA, and return on capital employed), how to judge a moat and a management team, and why Neil calls valuation "an educated, informed guess" – and means it as a compliment.
Part 2 covers position sizing and portfolio construction. Part 3: when to sell, and how to hold your nerve. Subscribe so you don't miss them.
Read the framework:
The Seven Decisions, Explained – every piece on Noise Cancelling is tagged to the decision it belongs to: 
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This video is for information and education only. It is not investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. Capital is at risk. Seek independent financial advice before making investment decisions.

Britain's housing crisis is a myth. Neil Woodford has run money for over 35 years, and in this episode he tests the UK housing market's most repeated story against 55 years of data: mortgage payments as a share of take-home pay are close to their long-run average, buying costs less per month than renting the same home, and real house prices have been falling for five years.
So why can't young people buy? The average first-time buyer was 23 in 1960 and is 34 today. The answer is not affordability. It is a banking rule written after the financial crisis: capital requirements that make high loan-to-value mortgages uneconomic for banks to write. Nobody banned the 95% mortgage. It died of unprofitability, and UK mortgage approvals have run 40% below normal for 15 years.
Then the investment question. Housebuilders trade at roughly 70p per pound of assets while the banks have re-rated back above book. Is the market right about the builders, or is it pricing a suppressed market as a dead one? Neil gives his position, what would change his mind, and what he is watching: the regulator's decision on loan-to-income caps, due within months.

Is UK wealth inequality actually rising? Wes Streeting calls inequality "the fracture running through modern Britain", and the coming budget leans on the same story. Neil Woodford has spent weeks in the data, and it says something very different.
In this episode, Neil and Jon work through what the official numbers show: the top 10 percent's share of British wealth was 56 percent in 1980 and 57 percent four decades later, flat through the biggest asset boom in the country's history. They explain why compounding means wealth gaps should widen automatically, and what cancelled it: the occupational pension revolution, faster pay growth at the bottom, and a tax system where the top 1 percent of earners now pay 28 percent of all income tax.
Then the measurement problem. The gap between Britain's richest and poorest fifth is 12 to 1 before taxes and benefits, and 3.3 to 1 after. Same country, same year, same statisticians. Which number you get quoted depends on who is quoting it.
Finally: does inequality actually damage growth? Neil's answer, and what it means for the tax rises now being floated ahead of the budget.