Thursday 23 June 2011

investment gripes among the currants

After looking at the weather forecast this morning I decided to leave the bees until tomorrow, as heavy rain was forecast by lunchtime and thunderstorms by tea.  Instead I picked more blackcurrants and raspberries (what with the bees trying to swarm and the soft fruit ripening it's probably just as well that thanks to the cat we're here and not in the Cotswolds).  At half past ten heavy rain suddenly fell on me for five minutes, then it was dry again for the rest of the morning.  The Systems Administrator, who had gone to the supermarket to buy lunch and cat litter, reported that at the far end of the lane it was raining so hard that a sheet of water was pouring off the potato field across the road, while back at the farmyard there was no rain at all.  Our fruit cage must have been just on the edge of it.

I pick the blackcurrants from the comfort of a three legged collapsible stool bought in the local fishing shop, which saves me having to stoop.  It is an excellent system, and I recommend it to anyone else who suffers from a dodgy lower back (so that's most of the UK population over 45 who have ever commuted or worked in an office).  The suggestion came from a junior hospital doctor, whose speciality was not actually orthopaedics, as she tried to work out whether the pains in the part of my body that were her speciality were anything to do with her, or simply referred back pain.  I do like it when doctors treat the whole person, and I hope she goes far in her profession.

As I picked I listened to Radio 4, and Nick Clegg's proposal that the privatised banks should be given to the British people, as their money had been used to save the banks.  There is another group of people whose money was used to keep the British banks on a life support machine and who had absolutely no say in what happened, and that was the small shareholders.  I know that, because I am one.  I ended my wild City days as a UK equities pension fund manager (how wild can you get) working for a subsidiary of Lloyds Bank, and I committed the incredibly rash act of buying shares in the bank for which I worked under the staff sharesave scheme.  When I left I kept the shares, believing Lloyds to be a soundly managed bank of impeccable dullness.  Given I got that one so wrong it is probably just as well that I am now employed as a horticulturalist and not an investment manager.

Fortunately I was not there for very long, so I couldn't buy very many shares.  Possibly you think it served me right to lose some of my evil gains from the iniquitious sink that is the investment market.  This is what I tell myself, as well as reminding myself that at least I got some tax relief when I bought them.  But as evil City schemers went we were very much at the innocent end of the scale.  We invested in shares in UK companies.  We tried to identify decent companies that were undervalued.  We even met the managements and tried to understand their strategies, which is more than index funds do.  We weren't always very good at it, and we were probably overpaid for what we did, though compared to investment bankers we were paupers.  But if you don't feel for me, have sympathy for people like the father of a friend of a friend, who worked for Lloyds retail banking operations all his life, and took part in the employee sharesave.  He's dead now, but the nest egg he thought he was leaving to his wife is almost worthless.

When Lloyds were given special dispensation by Gordon Brown and the banking regulators to acquire HBOS, and with it a larger slice of the UK banking market than would normally be permitted under UK competition rules, the authorities decided not to tell the Lloyds investors who were required to vote to allow this to happen that HBOS was already pretty much bust and in receipt of secret government funding.  If Lloyds shareholders had known that maybe they would have voted differently.  There is now a shareholders' group taking legal action for compensation.  I haven't paid to join.  It felt like throwing good money after bad, and after watching the long slow quest of Equitable Life policyholders for compensation I don't expect the Treasury to be handing out a big lump of cash any time soon.  The bigger fools us shareholders for trusting management who when it came to it behaved like greedy idiots.  We were materially misled, though.  Or, in plain language, they lied to us and took our money.

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