Knowledge and insight

From greed to fear – where next?

Polls suggest that a majority of the British public would like to see rail, energy and water services renationalised. We look at the history of nationalisation in the UK and consider what a return to state control would entail and whether it is genuinely viable.

With the Brexit decision tree we shared earlier this year we aimed to make sense of what at times has seemed a senseless situation. There are still many unknowns, but with new information starting to shine through in the last month, we are now publishing an update.

When did you last review your investment mandate? Are you taking unappreciated risks in following an income-only approach? Andy Pitt, Head of charities at Rathbones, assesses what to consider when answering these questions. 

As far as the environment is concerned, Christmas is the least wonderful time of the year, as the highest heights of consumption are scaled through miles of wrapping paper, mountains of turkey, and rivers of petrol. But fear not! There are ways to keep Scrooge from darkening your door while making your Christmas more environmentally friendly too.

If housing wealth were used to provide an income in retirement, researchers calculate that the savings gaps, discussed in our previous article, could be halved. But few retirees draw on property wealth today, while home ownership rates are falling.

A week that started with such optimism ended in disappointment as trade-war and US slowdown fears cast their shadow, Scrooge-like, over investors’ hopes for a year end “Santa rally”.

Fed Chair Jay Powell’s more dovish comments helped recover investor sentiment at the start of the week. But the sceptics remained convinced that the trade truce reached at last weekend’s G-20 summit was just a quick fix, which may lead to heightened strains between the countries further down the line.

“I am a tariff man.”

Numerous studies have predicted a large retirement ‘savings gap’ — the shortfall in current or projected pension provisioning from a benchmark level of retirement income. The figure of 70% of pre-retirement income has become the heuristic benchmark, often termed a 70% ‘replacement rate’. Though sometimes criticised for arbitrariness, it is actually supported by the economic and social science literature since the 1960s (Modigliani 1966).