Bond market power: why Rachel Reeves is keen to keep the £2.7tn ‘beast’ onside

Hugely influential traders will be hanging on the chancellor's every word when she announces her budget

At just after 12.30pm on Wednesday, the machine will be listening, the trading algorithms ready, and billions of pounds of buy-and-sell orders stacked up awaiting Rachel Reeves's budget.

For the first time on the London trading floor of Deutsche Bank, a custom-built artificial intelligence tool will tune in to the chancellor's speech. It will transcribe her words, spot shifts in tone and spit out alerts when the numbers deviate from expectations.