472 mortgage products disappeared in 48 hours this month. The Bank of England's direction flipped from near-certain cut to near-certain hold in days. This is the fifth major reversal since 2020 — COVID, the mini-budget, the 2023 inflation spike, the autumn budget, and now Iran. In this issue: why the calm of the 2010s was the anomaly, what's keeping the volatility baked in, and what good client service actually looks like when the ground keeps shifting.
Start with one number: the Bank of England changed its base rate 89 times in the 1980s. In the entire 2010s, the longest hold in the Bank's 300-plus year history, it changed it zero times. The 2020s so far have seen roughly 18 changes, tracking closer to the 1990s (~27) than either extreme (BoE Bank Rate database). That decade of stillness was the anomaly, not the baseline.
What's genuinely new is the mass product withdrawal — a phenomenon that didn't exist before 2020. Then five spikes in six years: 462 products in a day (COVID, April 2020); 935 in a day after the mini-budget (September 2022); 373+ in a week during the 2023 inflation shock; the biggest monthly drop since July 2023 after the autumn budget; and 472 in 48 hours this month — "the most turbulent since the mini-budget" (Moneyfacts, via PropertyWire).
Two-year swap rates jumped 32bps in days this month (Introducer Today). Gilts saw their biggest weekly rise since the mini-budget (MarketScreener). Since late 2023, the market has reversed its rate expectations five times (BoE MPC minutes; Bloomberg; Mortgage Introducer poll, March 2026). This isn't crisis after crisis. It's a rhythm, and it's not slowing down.
Huw Pill, the Bank of England's chief economist, put a name to this last October: the "NASTY" era, Not As Tranquil Years. The pace of global change, he said, is "increasing rather than diminishing" (BoE speech, October 2025). That's the Bank's own chief economist saying the old normal isn't coming back.
The drivers aren't one-off events. They're structural. Europe's shift from Russian pipeline gas to global LNG means UK energy costs now move with weather in Texas, shipping disruptions, and competition from Asian buyers. Gas price volatility in 2024 was 50% above the 2010–2019 average. Trade policy uncertainty hit record highs in early 2025 and the US tariff regime has changed legal basis twice in two months. The BIS warns this "frequent cycle of announcements, adjustments, and reversals" is making economies more sensitive to shocks, with bigger inflation responses and sharper central bank moves. On top of that: Iran, Ukraine aftermath, defence spending at Cold War levels, New START expired with no replacement. Chatham House's December 2025 assessment: "global security continued to unravel."
"The drivers of the Great Moderation — the long period of low and stable inflation that defined the economy from the early 1990s to around 2020 — may be unwinding."
Catherine Mann, BoE MPC member, November 2024. Mann is the committee's most hawkish voice, but the structural argument she's making here is shared more widely.
The closest historical parallel is the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not the rate levels, which were much higher, but the rhythm. That era averaged about five rate changes a year, with repeated reversals: the Lawson boom, the ERM entry and exit, Black Wednesday (BoE Bank Rate database). Brokers then had telephones and paper. The rhythm is familiar. What's different now is the tools to respond in real time actually exist.
The OBR's March 2026 forecast has inflation returning to 2.3% by end-2026 and growth recovering from 2027 (OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, March 2026). Global LNG supply is expanding (nearly 50% capacity increase by 2030), which should moderate gas prices over time. History offers comfort too: the stagflationary 1970s gave way to the Great Moderation. If Iran de-escalates and services inflation finally cracks, the Bank of England has room to cut in H2 2026. Markets could be over-pricing persistence.
I think the evidence points the other way. The shocks since 2020 are supply-side, interconnected, and they coincide with structural changes — deglobalisation, ageing populations, climate costs — that weren't present in previous recoveries. The optimists might be right about where inflation is heading. But the calm predictability of the 2010s probably isn't coming back, wherever rates end up.
Most brokers were paying attention this month. The gap was whether their setup let them turn that into action for every affected client. Volatility exposes the distance between knowing something changed and being able to do anything about it. Three questions worth asking:
Do your clients hear from you before they hear from the news? Rate alerts, sourcing platform notifications, a BoE RSS feed. The infrastructure exists. The question is whether it's wired into the daily routine.
Can you tell them specifically how they're affected? The broker who can immediately say "I have 17 cases affected by this move" serves their clients better than one who knows the market moved but has to work out who's exposed. The technology here is catching up fast, and it's worth asking your sourcing platform or CRM provider where they are on it.
Can you reach them fast enough to act? The first call a client gets after their product disappears is the one they remember. The channel matters less than the speed.
When 472 products disappeared this month, none were ours. We repriced, sometimes quickly, sometimes upward, but we didn't pull products. Our funding structures and tech meant we could absorb the shock instead of passing it on. For brokers with cases in flight on our products, the application they started on Monday still worked on Wednesday.
Hal's laid out the case for why the market is operating differently. The question I'd be asking: what does a broker actually need to change, and how much depends on the size and shape of the firm?
No systems overhaul needed. Start with what's already there: most sourcing platforms (Twenty7tec, Mortgage Brain, Iress) have alerting features that go unused. A BoE RSS feed piped into email takes fifteen minutes and costs nothing. On CRM: it matters less which one than whether client data is searchable when you need it. Options like Capsule, Pipedrive, or mortgage-specific platforms (Smartr365, Acre, and others) all do more than a spreadsheet when you need to know which clients are on a product that's just been repriced. For outbound, speed matters more than polish. Tools like Brevo, TextMagic, and Loom all have free tiers.
At five-plus advisers, the challenge shifts from awareness to consistency. Mortgage-specific CRMs (Smartr365, Acre, Twenty7tec CRM, JammJar) integrate with sourcing data more tightly than general-purpose tools, but only if the firm uses them consistently. The bit that matters most, automatically identifying which clients are affected when a product changes, is where the technology is moving fastest. The question to put to providers: not "what features do you have?" but "what happens when a product my client is mid-application on gets repriced at 7pm on a Tuesday?"
Networks and clubs handle sourcing well, and some are starting to add monitoring too. If yours isn't there yet, it's worth raising: could they help brokers spot changes, not just find products?
Consumer Duty expects firms to act in clients' interests when markets move. Systematic monitoring is useful on its own terms, but it's also getting harder to justify not having it. Brokers who can demonstrate active monitoring with an audit trail will be in a stronger position when questions get asked.
None of this requires ripping out what's already working. Start with checking what's already there and whether it's switched on.
The test is simple: if rates moved overnight and half your pipeline was on the wrong product, would your brokers be calling their clients, or would their clients be calling them? If the honest answer is the latter, that's the gap worth closing — at their own pace, but with some urgency.
Headline CPI fell to 3.0% and the papers celebrated. But services inflation, the number the MPC is actually fixated on, sat at 4.4% in January and has barely budged. Regular pay growth at 4.2% feeds directly into it. The oil shock adds energy costs on top. Deutsche Bank forecasts CPI approaching 4% by end-2026 if services doesn't crack. The 19 March MPC decision will hinge on services, not the headline. The "inflation is falling" narrative is doing real damage to client expectations.
Every broker is fielding the "but inflation's falling, won't rates follow?" question. They need the 30-second version of why it's more complicated than the papers suggest. Services inflation is the stubborn part, and it's the part that drives rate decisions. That framing — headline vs services, and which one the MPC actually watches — is worth passing on.
Sources: ONS CPI January 2026; Deutsche Bank UK inflation forecast; ING rates forecast; BoE MPC minutes, February 2026.
41,760 new second charge loans in 2025, worth £2.14 billion — up 24% year-on-year. Highest since 2008, though the comparison ends there: today's market is structurally different, with post-2014 regulation, tighter affordability checks, and a product that's evolved from last-resort credit into mainstream capital-raising. Second charges now account for nearly a third of all capital-raising lending. Part of that is borrowers preserving low first-charge rates from 2021–22, part of it is lending appetite broadening. March's repricing makes the rate-preservation maths even more compelling.
For brokers where second charge advice isn't part of their proposition, it's worth exploring what's involved — the volume is there and growing. For some firms that means getting qualified and panelled; for others it might mean finding a good specialist partner to refer to. Either way, a third of capital-raising conversations shouldn't be walking out the door without the broker being part of them.
Sources: Finance & Leasing Association via Mortgage Solutions, 2025 full-year data; Signal 19.
Catherine Mann, "The Great Moderation 20 Years On" — BoE speech, November 2024. The structural case for why volatility persists, from the MPC's most outspoken member.
bankofengland.co.uk
BIS Annual Economic Report 2025, Chapter 1 — "Sustaining Stability Amid Uncertainty." The global backdrop to everything in this issue.
bis.org
IEA, "What Drives Natural Gas Price Volatility in Europe and Beyond?" — The energy volatility argument in full. Worth reading if the gas/LNG point caught your eye.
iea.org
Chatham House, "Global Security Continued to Unravel in 2025" — December 2025 assessment. Blunt and well-sourced. Useful context for the geopolitical side of the argument.
chathamhouse.org
Market Watch is a monthly commentary from Hal Sarjant and Sara Palmer at Gen H.
It reflects our personal views and observations, not financial advice.
All data referenced is from public sources unless stated otherwise.
© 2026 Gen H · intermediaries.generationhome.com