Month: May 2022

As I write this, inflation in the UK is nearly 10% yet interest rates are 1%. It’s clear that economics are broken: they are where the Standard Model is in physics. Clever theories won Nobel Prizes but have helped little in the real world. Monetarist or Keynsian, money itself is broken.

On one hand we have ‘full’ employment and lack of manpower all around with the ’supply chain’ broken in so many places. On the other, we have food banks feeding a large proportion of the UK.

Surely this suggests just one thing ? Wages are far too low.

Worse still, the pandemic has seen many older and better off people withdraw from the job market totally. With money worth nearly nothing and its utility also fast diminishing (how many Deliveroos can you order in a day ?), there is little motivation to work or even get richer.

Ideas, free time and personal agendas are the features of the 2020s.

For decades, salaries have barely risen in the UK for most people, whereas wealth for the top 1% has exploded. There’s something viciously Victorian about this scenario, an era that our current Eton and Oxford educated Tories hanker after (as, it has to be admitted, do many of their serfish Brexiteer followers).

So, Johnny foreigner has to be kept out, the workers need to be kept in their place and Britain can be great again.

Except money is broken. The dollar is hanging on in there against competition from the ludicrous, polluting Bitcoin (which deserves a carbon tax). But money isn’t worth anything.

The last refuge for Brits was property. So many of us own second homes and ’buy-to-lets’: my property investments have consistently outstripped everything I have ever done or invested in.

So, once again, it’s more economical to sit in a home whose price is rising by 10% a year than go to work.

The real currency of the UK is our housing stock, swathes of which is unproductive since it was bought by overseas investors under the nose of the Mayor of London, who is, er, now our Prime Minister as he did nothing to alleviate housing costs for his constituents.

So, you can mine money by sitting at home or using an environment destroying rig, since mining for gold or being an investment banker is pretty difficult.

The question remains: if money isn’t worth anything, how do we measure our values ?

I spent an early part of my career working in financial marketing and saw all the shenanigans used by ’the City’ to make its ridiculous salaries. From ’arbitrage’ to ’active fund management’ and definitely in ’investment banking’ it was a joke then and is more laughable now.

Over 30 years, I paid between £300-£400 a month into a pension fund. I received forests of documents meant to protect and inform me during this time. But very little information on what the money men were earning and what return they were delivering, let alone the interest of MPs and government ministers in the funds and company I was/am invested in.

Suffice to say that my pension is worth less than the money paid in after 32 years of being passed around from Refuge to others then Royal London then Scottish Widows (who recently sacked the risible vowel-averse and profit averse abrdn as fund managers in favour of Blackrock.

The same pattern is reflected across my ISAs and in my crypto investments.

Only two things have made me money over the past 38 years – my own companies and property (arguably we’ve done well with art and gold as well).

So you really have to ask what the point of these so called ’professional’ money managers is ? abrdn should clearly have its funds sold or reallocated and be closed down since its fund managers under perform what my cat would do with an inkpad and the FT (and Tigger only requires a can of tuna as payment).

I’m sure that there are good money managers out there but I’m damned if they want to deal with those of us with under £10m.

Money, as they say, begets money and all that’s left for us relatively poor plonkers is buy-to-let and the ravages of inflation.

Once upon a time Boris Johnson was hugely popular. He convinced the Labour and LibDem voters of London to make him mayor and took the glory for Rival Livingstone’s hard work in winning the Olympics for the city.

He then fudged his rather liberal views to oppose the EU and front the successful but ultimately disastrous Brexit project.

It was a continuation of rule by the notorious Oxford Bullingdon Club.

Then there was Partygate, proving that our Tory rulers believe that the laws they create do not apply to them.

The Tory prevaricstion over energy security is, perhaps, what is most unforgivable. The risible David ’husky’ Cameron introduced some great eco policies and then cut them down in the name of a book balancing exercise that seems risible after Covid.

Prioritising profit over security seems to be a particularly Tory trait.

On the verge of WW3, with the economy tanking and many people facing sheer poverty, the clown’s face paint is running, his quips aren’t funny any more.

BoJo the clown is dead.