The Cowell Rhetoric: Will They?

October 3, 2014

Better be early than wait till you’re late, says David Cowell of Myddleton Croft Investment Managers. (Work that one out, folks)

Don’t forget, the new intestacy rules came in on Wednesday. Among the changes outlined in the new Inheritance and Trustees’ Powers Act, is that when someone without children dies, their whole estate will pass to their spouse. Yet another reason for contacting your clients.

Keith Richards, chief executive of the Personal Finance Society, opened the FE conference on Tuesday and said that providers must do more to clearly articulate their service and fund propositions to advisers. He also said that in terms of IFA due diligence “it’s time to be brutally honest about internal resource capacity and expertise.” In other words, it may be better to leave it to the professionals.

Rory Percival from the FCA spoke at the same conference and touched upon the same theme, “Due diligence, or at least inadequate due diligence, underpins a lot of the incidences of crystallised risk we’ve seen…Keydata, Arch Cru…so it is a key important area.”

Another good reason for using Myddleton Croft; you only have to do DD on us, we do it on the investments. Head the regulator off at the pass, or, as Willie John remarked, get your retaliation in first! Call Julie Jones or me.

The European Central Bank is pushing to buy up “junk” rated asset backed securities from peripheral Europe, the FT reports. If this is agreed, it will significantly boost the economies of the likes of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and Spain.

On Wednesday, the French government unveiled the draft budget for 2015, confirming that it will bring deficit below 3% of GDP only in 2017 – two years later than initially agreed with the European Commission.

In a statement accompanying the draft budget, the French government says, “The pace of deficit reduction is adapted to the [economic] situation…No further efforts will be demanded of the French because, while the government accepts budgetary seriousness to put the country back on track, it rejects austerity.” In other words, ‘We will not play your silly little games if we cannot win.’ Can you imagine HMG taking a similar line? Perhaps that’s where we are going wrong.

It would appear that the Min of Justice has gone too far with the latest round of judge appointments. Previously a judge was known as His/her Honour Judge whatever. However, according to the Court Circular page in the Torygraph, we now have, for example, “District Judge (Magistrates Courts) whatever”. Does one address them as such or will Sir/Madam do? If so, how does one articulate brackets? Perhaps Victor Borge was ahead of his time with phonetic punctuation.

UK economic growth has been revised up to 0.9% for the second quarter of the year by the Office for National Statistics. The Markit/CIPS UK Manufacturing PMI released on Wednesday fell to 51.6, its lowest level since April last year. Manufacturing has never (no – never) been huge part of the economy. We have some world beaters but we won’t beat the Germans as long as the euro is as low as it is now. Follow the money, as Deepthroat said.

Gideon drops a bombshell. Drops the ‘death tax’ on pension pots. He is creating a bonanza for advisers and for SIPPS. That’s also good for us as we will be managing the money.

Inflation figures for the eurozone have just been released. They show that inflation across the 18-member bloc slowed to an annual rate of 0.3% in September; down from 0.4% in August.

The Hang Seng in Hong Kong has closed 1.3% lower on Tuesday, after closing 1.9% on Monday amid pro-democracy protests on the streets. Investors remain concerned about the impact the protests could have. Markets there were closed Wednesday and Thursday for public holidays.

As Jeremy Clarkson might opine, some say that the US equity market is overvalued, The Stig would merely say it was interesting. Below is a chart showing the returns achieved on the S&P when buying at various levels of the Shiller P/E. Where are we now? Oh, about 26, which is top decile. Was anyone going to say, “This time is different?”