Ask No Monkey Business clients what they most value about our approach and they mostly answer ‘more certainty’. On the surface this is odd as one thing singling us out, which stems directly from how we model real equity returns, is that we tell people just how uncertain are their wealth outcomes when partly relying on the systematic risk inherent in equities.
read more Commentary by Stuart FowlerPublished in FT, 9th November 2008 (Article by Stuart Fowler)
read more News by Stuart FowlerAs befits our financial planning background, a theme of this blog for several years has been the excessive leveraging of household, corporate and government balance sheets. Economic activity grew faster than incomes and rising asset prices, particularly land prices, created a false impression of wealth (and of collateral for the banks lending the money).
read more Commentary by Stuart FowlerAfter talking to friends at Lehman and one of the two Iceland-owned British banks allowed to fail, I am inclined to think that the main reason why depositors in UK banks can expect the Government to keep them safe from loss is not the impact on depositors so much as the impact on a bank’s corporate customers of a commercial bank going into administration.
read more Commentary by Stuart FowlerIn the Sunday Times today I read that banks are ‘exploiting obscure legal powers to seize the homes of thousands of people who cannot pay their credit card bills’. In fact, there is nothing new under the Consumer Credit Act about ‘charging orders’. What was new was the active encouragement by banks of crippling levels of debt and interest that looked a certain route to bad debts, that is unless the banks intended to use charging orders to recover the debt, when it finally got too much, from the value of the borrower’s home.
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