An independent (financial adviser's) view

Having left our then-teenagers in charge for a weekend some years ago, my detective wife found carefully-hidden evidence of carpet burns and wine spillages. ‘Did you have a party while we were away?’, we asked. ‘No, it was just a gathering’ was the stock reply. It’s line I suspect Boris used once or twice in his Etonian days, and which I doubt worked any better then. Anyway, only one more of these to come in 2021. And although we’re a two-tree-family, both have stood undecorated for a week now. Those halls won’t deck themselves, will they?

“UK ECONOMIC GROWTH SLOWS SHARPLY”

Is this a surprise? And is it anything to worry about? It would be surprising, I’d say, if growth did not continue to stutter. Inflation’s increasing, Omicron’s soaring, bits of lockdown are reappearing and, guess what, Brexit may not have been great for business. However, if you’re an investor and we’ve been doing a good job for you, you won’t have more than a few of your eggs in the UK Boris Basket; if some of your eggs are green, you’re investing in the future; and ‘O’ means interest rates aren’t going up in a hurry. So, to paraphrase another, rather different Tory PM, there really are no alternatives.

“FCA’S TRANSFORMATION DIRECTOR STEPS DOWN”

Job titles were a feature of the brilliant ‘W1A’, a toe-curlingly close, according to insiders, satire on the workings of the BBC. They included Head of Values, Director of Better and Director of Purpose. That the FCA has a ‘Director of Transformation’ does make it sound rather more like the Ministry of Magic than a regulator determined to root out financial malpractice and keep the banks in check. That it needs transforming is both worrying and, based on my almost weekly calls to them about one thing or another, accurate. Unlike the NHS and others, however, its shortcomings most certainly cannot be blamed on underfunding.

“ZOPA PULLS OUT OF P2P BLAMING COWBOYS FOR ‘DAMAGING CUSTOMER TRUST’”

Peer-to-Peer lending is the slightly more organised equivalent of a mate saying ‘got this great idea, lend us a tenner, you won’t regret it’. ‘Want a bet?’ should be your answer. P2P arrived to fill the gap when banks, inexplicably, stopped lending to anyone with a pulse in 2009. The government thought it such a good idea that they, equally inexplicably, allowed packages of these loans to be ISA’d. Now the cracks are starting to show and it will, I predict, go the way of much of the ‘secondary banking’ of years gone by. Full circle. Once again.

“CARE HOMES: FOLLOWING THE MONEY TRAIL”

Care homes began to be privatised at the end of Maggie’s ‘80s. All sorts of grants were being handed out and we had enquires from (literally) all sorts looking to finance the conversion of anything they could buy into a barracks for the elderly. The whole business (as it was by then) soon became murkier. Some clients spent years trying to trace the absent owner of their rapidly deteriorating ‘retirement village’, which turned out to be an offshore company whose UK subsidiary had gone bust. So Panorama is right to say ‘follow the money’ if you want to know why the whole thing is such a mess. Many a vested interest is, I’d say, likely to materialise with more murk still to emerge.

’Thunderball’ was my first cinema Bond. The gadgets, jetpacks and that Aston Martin were cutting-edge and I of course had the Corgi (kids etc., like most of this) version for Christmas. Blofeld, the baddie with the eye-patch, was a proper baddie with a proper lair. To have the current Bond driving a 55-year-old car with 60s gizmos is hardly cutting-edge. The only vaguely modern thing about this is that the shoot-out on the villain’s Tracy Island is like a bad computer game. There’s a reason everyone says Sean was the best Bond: that they really should have quit while they were ahead. Not worth ￡15 of your streaming monies. I’d say.