Friday 8 July 2016

Clutching at Bremain straws

The media is an interesting creature. All week I have watched it report every slight fall in the FTSE as the harbinger of doom and ignore any rise.


The mood music is unrelentingly downbeat. I work in the City and it indeed pretty crap.


Property and M&A deals have been put on hold. Companies are already looking at how to move their HQ's into Europe. Some staff are thinking of going home...


Re the transactional deals, even with super optimism I can see this is an issue that will last for a few months yet. That in itself is bad for business, but M&A and Property deals are not the whole world (although many debt markets are shut too).


On the other hand, property prices are about to fall quite quickly and this will stimulate demand. A lack of new issues is generally good for current equity market participants too...just not the Banks who provide the commentary.


Also, we seem to have dumped most of our useless political leaders. This is a good thing, especially if we get a new Chancellor and Leader of the Opposition who is not a cold war commie warrior.


But he most egregious thing I keep seeing is very well fed and paid people moaning about the result. Claiming the referendum should be voted out of Parliament, hiring lawyers, marching and whining. Just today I had one chap bemoaning the state of the world as he locked his DB9.


My hunch is if they ran the referendum again the Leave vote would be higher. It achieved its main objective - change to the liberal elite media dominance. Why would we not do so again?


Because we might lose Scotland - give the English a vote on that issue and St Nicola would be happier than ever?


No the moaning about the result is both dull and expected. The deed is done, the die is cast, the Rubicon crossed, the fat lady is in the cab on her way home.


Let's get this pesky bit out of the way and plan for the future  - the quicker we do it, the quicker the economy recovers.

13 comments:

Blue Eyes said...

Some people are not used to being told "no". My guess is that someone who can buy a DB9 is likely to be in this category.

We do need to crack on with it. Whatever it is.

Nice to see Javid opening talks with India and George off to China next week. My guess is that Cameron and Obama will be having a good chat in Warsaw today.

Anyone know why the President of the EU Council is at the NATO meeting?

Thud said...

The leave vote has caused me no end of financial pain but I'm working at mitigating the damage and I hope to profit from a future that does look rather scary at present.I'm old enough to have lived through a Liverpool of the 70's and 80's and thrived...surely nothing can be that bad?

Bill Quango MP said...

Had that meeting this morning.
Along the lines of

The deed is done. We are going to leave. Stop wishing it wasn't so and thinking it [Theresa] May never happen

Stop telling me what happened last week and tell me what is going to happen next week. That's all that matters.

Anonymous said...

The Daily Mash have a take on it?

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/tickets-to-london-property-crash-already-sold-out-20160708110479

But under the humour is a serious point which is stop putting your cash into asset bubbles and go out and make/grow/sell things - outside the EU.

Doesn't really matter who is in No 10 as they do fuck all anyway.

Steven_L said...

I think we will probably talk ourselves into a mid cycle recession here, but not a very deep one. The slight rebound in oil prices and slump in GBP will see inflation pick up and real GDP fall. Throw in less credit creation and less business investment and 2 quarters (I'd bet 3) of negative growth seems about right.

People have snapped out of believing 10% per annum house price inflation is on the cards indefinitely to predicting a crash literally overnight. Quicker than they did when the 2007 crunch started, when the queues developed outside Northern Rock, when Lehmanns went under and the foundations of the world economy shuddered. The hot money has fled the UK at breakneck pace, for now.

And this is the thing. This is everyone's recent experience of a UK recession, a credit event leading to a banking crisis, mortgage famine and quick 30% fall in house prices.

But it won't happen this time. This is a different kind of recession. This is people choosing not to consumer and invest, not a 100:1 leveraged banking system going bust. The banks are well capitalised, the BofE is at the ready, HM Treasury are handing out crisp £50 notes to aspiring homeowners. As Sarkozy said "Laissez faire c'est fini" - he was right. The powers that be are plugged into the system and they are hell bent on keeping it going.

So I'm going to keep buying property and financial stocks throughout this downturn, expecting them to yield double by the actual top of this credit cycle, which will be the mid 2020's I reckon.

Nick Drew said...

@ Anyone know why the President of the EU Council is at the NATO meeting?

Did you go to that link I posted a few days ago, BE?
http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/Infoservice/Presse/Meldungen/2016/160624-BM-AM-FRA.html

EC has always fancied an army of its own (which is actually quite logical): and I reckon one of the federast strategies, is - hurry, while the Brits are preoccupied, let's move the whole thing several notches to the left & then make with the quick-setting concrete, before anyone else asks for a referendum ...

Blue Eyes said...

ND I get all that, but surely when an organisation is actively seeking to replace/undermine another, the latter should have better sense than to invite the former to its throw-down?

And not all EU states are members of NATO, are they? Didn't the Irish get pretty annoyed about the non-neutrality issue a few years ago, etc.?

dearieme said...

On the whole I view Boris as an entertainer rather than a politician, but he put his finger on something when he said that the Remnants' antics reminded him of the hysteria over Princess Di.

Maybe we should start referring to the People's Plebiscite?

Graeme said...

Not only is there a chance that party politics will be reconfigured but we also seem to have moved away from the stupidity of sado-austerity - Osborne talking about tax cuts instead of endlessly racheting taxes upwards, admitting that the balanced budget was just a fantasy. The sun is starting to shine for Britain.

Y Ddraig Goch said...

BE @ 6:00 pm

"And not all EU states are members of NATO, are they? Didn't the Irish get pretty annoyed about the non-neutrality issue a few years ago, etc.?"

I actually did read the paper ND linked and the proposed Franco-German position is that they will act as a pair to move forward with various initiatives and the rest of the EU can join them now, or later, or not at all, as they choose - but France and Germany will do it anyway. Ireland might choose to distance itself from an EU army, but that paper is perfectly clear - there is going to be one and it will be at least Franco-German. (Plus similar remarks for a number of other areas.) If the proposals in that paper are realised then it will utterly transform the EU. In fact, if they move that way reasonably quickly, then the people hoping to overturn the referendum or sabotage Brexit will find themselves pushing for us to join something that is quite different to the thing we voted to leave.

Anonymous said...

We do need to crack on with it. Whatever it is.

Who can disagree with the fist part? Yes we do have to get on. And the second part explains clearly with the first park won't happen.

We are currently f**ked as there is no plan, no plan b or c or ...z. We are facing a slo-mo descent into a recession of our own making without the plan, resources or leaders to do anything about it. Just think, headless chickens with union jack T-shirts.

Am I p*ssed off with the whole thing and why? An M&A deal that would have got me my own DB9 or two, has just got pulled. And we are still 8 weeks off anyone knowing the shape of the Brexit negotiating team and what their agenda will be.

Cameron was a idiot relying on the political nous of Osborne. Hope he gets his soon.

James Higham said...

Also, we seem to have dumped most of our useless political leaders. This is a good thing, especially if we get a new Chancellor and Leader of the Opposition who is not a cold war commie warrior.

All unfolding nicely.

Dan said...

What is quite amazing is just how blitheringly stupid the average political and City commentator can be with respect Europe. The general ethos seems to be much like the point of view of an idiot who has just jumped off an extremely tall building; the fact that he is completely OK until he hits the ground completely ignores the fact that he is in dire trouble.

A similar idiot-think can be seen with regards the EU.

A lot of major banks in the EU are in trouble. They have lent too much money to deadbeats who have no chance of repaying these loans. The European Central Bank is in trouble too, having lent money to deadbeats like Greece, Italy, Portugal, France and the like, who have no chance of paying all their debts, ever.

The entire bloody EU is in similar trouble, being mired in debt which can only get worse unless the entire zone faces reality, writes off a lot of debt and imposes cruel capitalism on a lot of other things.

Just because the disaster has yet to occur does not mean that it will not occur in future. Just because the EU is spectacularly good and exceedingly practised at papering over cracks does not mean that everything is rosy in the EU; it just means they're good liars.