Freaky in The Guardian

[rockfreak]

After a long layoff he's back again in the Grauniad (4 March). This time I'm protesting about City attempts to try and wean Cash Isa holders (of which I'm one) off their chosen investment instruments and onto British-based equity plans. I make the point that we've been here before when Thatcher and Lawson encouraged people to become part of the "share-owning democracy" and it duly blew up in 1990 after overheating. Most people then decided that they couldn't be Warren Buffett after all. For the ordinary punter their main concern is probably to have some reliable, building society investments which will at least be some kind of a hedge against inflation.

This may well resound with our Banker Brown who will have spent most of his working life in the rather more stable, pre-Lawsonite eras before huge bankers bonuses and when there was a separation between the two functions of the banks and the building societies.

[rockfreak]

So no response to my points about investing. There must be someone out there who's made a killing by some means or other. The only reason that I mention the subject is because my move a couple of years ago from a house in Gravesend to a modest retirement flat near Brighton (complete with sea view) left me, rather surprisingly, with a serious sum of money like I've never had before and so I was obliged to find a safe haven for it.

The Nationwide's investment advice women immediately poo-poohed my ideas of becoming Warren Buffett when she discovered my age and told me that any investment share plan she gave was for at least six years. She clearly thought that I might pop my clogs before then. It didn't help that I hadn't at that time got round to getting a hearing aid and was asking her to repeat everything over the phone. So I opted for premium bonds and cash Isas with two building societies. I've had a few wins with the premium bonds and it clearly benefits you the more you can hold. I was unlucky with the Isas because I took them out just a week before La Truss got up to her tricks and within another week they'd put on a whole point of interest (based around the yield on gilts which a nervous market sent upwards), Sometimes things can happen within the lifetime of a lettuce.

John Maynard Keynes once said that trouble starts when governments tell people they can get rich without working. This seems to have been proved by the events of the late 80s and early 90s when Thatcher and Lawson let finance rip and tried to promote the share-owning democracy and the property-owning democracy. It built up into an unsustainable bubble of private speculative cash and duly went pop.

[Avon]

So no response to my points about investing.

Probably because you never reply.

I’m surprised a house in Gravesend has much value at all.

[sejintenej]

This may well resound with our Banker Brown who will have spent most of his working life in the rather more stable, pre-Lawsonite eras before huge bankers bonuses and when there was a separation between the two functions of the banks and the building societies.

Fortunately I was otherwise engaged; you would be amazed at the scope for work in banks then and now. Any good as a 3 star chef? how about an electrician not connect with Heathrow? I spent 25 years deep in the throes of UK, New York(just a bit there) and Brazilian banking law; looking back perhaps the only financial side I did not do was buy and sell bonds - yes, I did buy and sell renmibi! At the time I retire I was responsible for 13 searate jobs in the bank from fire fighting training to translation to risk analysis to working in clients' offices (and got one mention on the FT front page (for that $25 billion item) and one on the back when I joint won the Xmas writing competition (both carries out in bnbk premises)..

So no response to my points about investing. There must be someone out there who's made a killing by some means or other.

Yes, I have got an ISA the shares have multiplied their value, but the funds have not done so well. I prefer to do my own research helped by the freebies posted on the internet and detailed analysis of companies. Doing it this way I can buy today and sell tomorrow.
Examples - I had looked at a north west England motor sales etc and rated it just about OK but no big forward. Read 7am of a takeover bid so bought the moment the market opened and before the price jumped; it did get taken over two months later. This one is old but I loved it. Going into bad recession but the rich do not stop spending. What do they buy? Ferrari cars and who was th UK cocessionaire at that time? They and I did very well as the other shares slumped.

[rockfreak]

He's done it again! Another letter today (9 May) in the Guardian and it's my now signature theme challenging the received wisdom that small changes in the Bank of England base rate make much difference to the economy. This all came about originally with Thatcher and Milton Friedman's ideas about the supremacy of monetary policy to the exclusion of all else. The result has been boom and bust and general volatility.

[dsm]

You should ask for your own column.

[rockfreak]

Actually I send more letters in than get printed. I wrote to them having a go at them for not printing more readers' letters because they always pride themselves on their relationship with their readers. The most prolific is Keith Flett, who I believe is a Labour councillor in Tottenham, who gets lots of short pithy letters in, and is a Guardian in-joke as a result.
The Grauniad (so called because of its typos in the old days of hot metal printing) has always had writers who are politically motivated. I've been on UK Uncut demos in the past where Polly Toynbee and Owen Jones turned up. And in the very early days I believe that Mark Thomas was part of it.

[rockfreak]

The Freakster rides again, only this time in The Observer which was until recently the Guardian's sister paper. "Economic deja vu" - which traces the history of "Minsky moments". Hyman Minsky was an American economist who attempted to trace the patterns of boom and bust and the gaps in between when folk memory faded and people said "it'll be different next time". With the banks pressuring Rachel Reeves to slacken rules and regulations and allow them to play silly b*ggers again, I warn that another Minsky moment may await us.

[rockfreak]

This time it's The Observer and it didn't go in. But I print it here for the interest of my older generation. It's replying to a female writer in the Guardian who had been to her first rugby match and found it inexplicable.

"Marie Le Conte needs to understand the history of rugby union. Before Dr Thomas Arnold in the 19th century sport at the public schools was a riotous and unregulated affair. A small boy was sometimes pressed into service as the ball. This culminated tragically in 1824 when the Earl of Suffolk's young son was killed. So rules were designed, but the rule-makers still had to retain the manly virtues in order to send the sons of the aristos out to cope with the challenge of running an empire. The manly virtues and hard knocks live on in the byzantine antics of the ruck and maul. But there was another purpose. The need to exhaust the young pupils and take their minds off sex. Sadly for the reformers this was a monumental failure if the steamy, underground atmosphere of homosexuality at my single-sex boarding school in the 1950s was anything to go by."

[oceania]

After a long layoff he's back again in the Grauniad (4 March). This time I'm protesting about City attempts to try and wean Cash Isa holders (of which I'm one) off their chosen investment instruments and onto British-based equity plans. I make the point that we've been here before when Thatcher and Lawson encouraged people to become part of the "share-owning democracy" and it duly blew up in 1990 after overheating. Most people then decided that they couldn't be Warren Buffett after all. For the ordinary punter their main concern is probably to have some reliable, building society investments which will at least be some kind of a hedge against inflation.

This may well resound with our Banker Brown who will have spent most of his working life in the rather more stable, pre-Lawsonite eras before huge bankers bonuses and when there was a separation between the two functions of the banks and the building societies.

I’ve been in defined-contribution pensions for my 20 or so working years. I understand they also want more of these invested in UK assets!

True, most of my colleagues are in the “default” fund and take no interest. Presumably the government will try and force companies to make their default funds more UK based.

I’m no expert but I’ve always monitored the performance of the funds available to me. Pension funds wholly or heavily UK based are, in my opinion, poor performers. I select my own funds and, not surprisingly, I have 0% invested in the UK. Most is invested in the USA.

I would like to think I’m a patriot, but gone are the days of generous guaranteed pension schemes. I need to make as much money as possible for retirement. The idea of investing my pension in UK assets or transferring a Cash ISA into a UK fund in a Stocks & Shares ISA is risky.

(I do apologise Freaky - one is a Telegraph reader )

[oceania]

The Nationwide's investment advice women immediately poo-poohed my ideas of becoming Warren Buffett when she discovered my age and told me that any investment share plan she gave was for at least six years. She clearly thought that I might pop my clogs before then. It didn't help that I hadn't at that time got round to getting a hearing aid and was asking her to repeat everything over the phone.

The bank I used to work for dealt with so many mis-selling scandals. Selling investments to 70+ year-olds suddenly became problematic.

Branch based advisors had targets to meet, so when a 90 year old lady walked in....

If I remember correctly, upper management felt that the blame was with the advisors for mis-interpreting the guidance they were given and taking their selling targets too seriously...

[rockfreak]

Whether it's Telegraph or Grauniad or FT, the best time to read these papers is at the weekend when they have magazine and review sections where pundits are allowed to have their say and it's often at variance with the weekday editorial line. It really doesn't surprise me that people are shying away from UK assets. Brexit is apparently causing billions of pounds to leak from our economy every year and more and more public companies are choosing to list other than in London. In today's Observer the veteran pundit Will Hutton says that we are not short on innovation but so many of our companies seem to get snapped up by other countries, particularly America and its private equity firms. This all stems from Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson who decided that it didn't matter who owned them. "We're open for business! Come in and help yourselves!"

[Katharine]

This time it's The Observer and it didn't go in. But I print it here for the interest of my older generation. It's replying to a female writer in the Guardian who had been to her first rugby match and found it inexplicable.

"Marie Le Conte needs to understand the history of rugby union. Before Dr Thomas Arnold in the 19th century sport at the public schools was a riotous and unregulated affair. A small boy was sometimes pressed into service as the ball. This culminated tragically in 1824 when the Earl of Suffolk's young son was killed. So rules were designed, but the rule-makers still had to retain the manly virtues in order to send the sons of the aristos out to cope with the challenge of running an empire. The manly virtues and hard knocks live on in the byzantine antics of the ruck and maul. But there was another purpose. The need to exhaust the young pupils and take their minds off sex. Sadly for the reformers this was a monumental failure if the steamy, underground atmosphere of homosexuality at my single-sex boarding school in the 1950s was anything to go by."

I notice you refer to the manly virtues, in the early 70s I attended the Inauguration of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. The first Chancellor was a member of the prominent Casely-Hayford family who had been educated at Dulwich and Clare College Cambridge. In his speech he said that he wanted to inculcate the manly sports of rugby and hang gliding this left many looking utterly bewildered. Did he even realise that there were female students at the university?

[rockfreak]

Yet another letter in the Grauniad, today (25 June). While filed under Non CH it struck me that there might be a connection.

Under the heading: "Posh schools, power and class-ridden society", it takes up on a piece by Alastair Campbell recently about the disproportionate number of public school graduates in the top professions. My point revolves around the fact that our rise to first world status was actually kickstarted in large part by the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century where products of the grammars and academies of lowland Scotland were responsible for our move away from religious superstition and towards empirical philosophy, economics, science, engineering and town planning. Followed by the movers and shakers of the industrial revolution who were a very mixed bunch indeed.

The Scottish schools were teaching science a century before the posh English schools got round to it, but I wonder whether CH was in line with or ahead of the curve here. There has been some comment before about Gordon van Praagh (have I spelt that right?) and his heuristic science teaching in the 1950s when I was there and that led to someone saying that it existed earlier in the century too. But you'd have to delve back into the days in London to find out whether CH was ahead of Eton et al. One amusing story dates from about 1808 when Shelley was experimenting with gunpowder at Eton and blew up the deputy headmaster's garden tree. There is of course always a bit of a problem at overtly Christian schools when faith suddenly confronts people being taught about rationality and empirical evidence.