Down is the new up in 2022 in the stock market, especially for once high-flying growth stocks.

Yet private company valuations have taken their sweet time to adjust to the new reality.

This includes crowdfunded shares on platforms like Seedrs* and Crowdcube, as well as the unlisted holdings of some investment trusts.

Despite a deep bear market in publicly-traded growth shares, I’ve seen some private ones raise money in 2022 at higher valuations. Perhaps even more than they achieved in the 2020-2021 euphoria.

Sure, the companies may have made solid progress since their last funding.

More users, higher revenues, and/or their products have new features.

But such valuations still seem fanciful, given that the multiples paid by public stock market investors – where, crucially, everyone can see what everyone else is paying – have crashed.

A fast-growing unlisted fintech that valued itself at, say, 80-100x revenues in mid-2021 should not expect the same valuation multiple in 2022.

Possibly not even the same order of magnitude.

Road to nowhere

I don’t begrudge their management teams if they can still raise money at high valuations, mind you.

Most such start-ups – and even some of the unlisted growth holdings of specialist investment trusts – are loss-making.

That’s often by design, especially in the (fin)tech sector.

Instead of tuning their operations for profits, they aim to scale fast.

Their business plans anticipate they’ll tap easy money to fuel this expansion.

Until recently, the deal had been that if you can show sufficiently fast growth, investors will show you the money.

Often these start-ups have less than 12 months of funding in the tank – as calculated via the aptly-named ‘burn rate’ – before they run out of road. Hence their need for regular injections of cash.

So it’s generally good for a company and its shareholders to sell precious equity at the highest valuation possible. Especially now market turbulence is seeping into the real economy, making growth and future funding even more uncertain.

It’s not about being greedy. A higher valuation gets more money in the door today. That buys more time for growth, while giving up less equity – much of which will be needed to sell in future rounds.

Yet an unrealistically high valuation probably isn’t great for the firm’s new investors.

I know this might seem stupendously obvious.

But there’s a contrasting school of thought that – within reason – it doesn’t matter too much what you pay for seed-stage investments.

Most of them are destined to more or less go to zero, anyway.

In light of this, even new investors might prefer to put money into a start-up that raises money at an inflated valuation, if by doing so the firm greatly extends its runway and hence its odds of finding success. (Or even just survival.)

You’ll likely lose money either way, whether you invest at a grossly high valuation or something more realistic.

But if you don’t lose, it will be because the firm is one of the minority that finds and wins its market and multi-bags1.

With such winners, you won’t care too much that you paid 20-30% over the odds when you bought in.

Our biggest ever sale

I understand this logic – which has driven even professional venture capital (VC) in recent years – but I don’t entirely buy it.

Not least because we’re probably not talking about a 25% overvaluation, given comparable valuations in the public markets.

The vast majority of listed high-growth/tech stocks are down 50-90% from their peaks – thanks to the regime change we’re going through due to higher interest rates and inflation.

Below are a few random examples of just the year-to-date falls.

I’ve definitely not cherry-picked rare duds here. And many such companies were already well down as 2022 began:

In light of such declines, an unlisted fintech that has raised new money at 25% above its last round could be in the order of 150% to 1,000% or more overvalued.

And indeed we are starting to see this now in some high-profile valuation adjustments.

Take the Swedish ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ firm Klarna.

Klarna just raised $800m at a valuation of $6.7bn. Which sounds like a decent chunk of change, until you remember it got money from Japan’s SoftBank last year at a valuation of nearly $46bn.

On Monday Klarna’s CEO took to Twitter to express sentiments similar to my points above:

Today Klarna announces an $800m financing round during the worst stock downturn and challenging macro in decades.

We are not immune to public peers being down 75-90% and hence our valuation is down on par.

The CEO doesn’t want his company’s valuation plunge to be seen as a Klarna-specific problem. Nor even as a blight on Buy Now Pay Later space.

Fair enough, I haven’t got a strong view except in that I passed on the chance (as a lah-dee-dah ‘sophisticated investor’) to invest in Klarna myself at that higher valuation, when a private holder offered a tranche of shares last year.

However the markdown is a wake-up call to investors in private companies deluding themselves about the current value of their portfolios, due to them not being marked-to-market or even liquid.

A butterfly flapping back to earth

One investor in private companies who has had to take notice of Klarna’s valuation collapse is the London-listed investment trust Chrysalis Holdings.

This fund came to wider attention in January. Back then its owner – the giant Jupiter – disclosed  the trust’s managers were to be paid an eye-watering £60.5m after blistering returns in 2021.

As CityAM reported:

[the managers] generated stellar returns for the firm in the past year with a 57 per cent increase in net asset value per share, after backing firms including fintech darlings Wise and Starling Bank.

Nice work if you can get it, but questions were asked about how these performance fees had been structured to allow such a colossal payout to two employees.

That particular potato is even hotter given Chrysalis’s share price slump in 2022:

What has happened here is largely that the market no longer believes Chrysalis’ unlisted holdings are worth as much as they are being carried for on its books.

And given that its biggest holding was Klarna – whose valuation has just been slashed by 85% remember – we can only applaud Mr Market’s foresight.

Until recently, Chrysalis’ official net asset value (NAV) had only declined modestly in 2022.

But the share price predicted different.

I’m not familiar with exactly how the trust calculates its NAV. Typically though, NAVs are based on the most recent valuations achieved by all the different portfolio companies.

(Sometimes – and especially controversially – even when it’s an existing investor that is putting more money in at a higher valuation – thus marking up their existing holdings).

On Monday Chrysalis reported that:

As announced on 23 May 2022, the Company’s net asset value (“NAV”) per ordinary share was 211.76p as of 31 March 2022.

It is estimated that the revised valuation of the Company’s investment in Klarna due to this funding round, along with the movement of listed assets and FX post-period end, would result in a decrease in the NAV per ordinary share of approximately 32p as compared to the Company’s last reported NAV per ordinary share.

The resulting NAV would therefore be 179.50p

Note that 45% of the portfolio is currently profitable and 51% of the portfolio is now either profitable or has sufficient cash to reach profitability. The remaining 44% of the portfolio, excluding cash, has approximately 15 months of runway without raising further capital.

This trust is therefore currently valued at roughly half its latest NAV – a very large discount.

Perhaps the magnitude of this discount is unwarranted. Or perhaps as the market clearly fears more of the portfolio will be revalued down in the months ahead.

Either way, if you own investment trusts with holdings of unlisted companies that are trading at big discounts to stale NAVs, I wouldn’t go ranting about the ‘irrational market’ right now.

NAV-er mind

Chrysalis is a striking example of a delayed NAV decline, made more contentious by the fee controversy.

But there are plenty of other investors in unlisted companies – whether directly or via funds – who are in denial about valuation adjustments.

At least with investment trusts, the canny stock market can knock down share prices to anticipate declines in the value of the underlying holdings.

Seeing your shares plunge to a steep discount is no fun for existing shareholders. But it is better for anyone pondering a purchase.

I’d argue it leads to better functioning capital markets, too.

In contrast, VC and private equity funds that are not listed – and so not marked-to-market – may continue to comfort their investors with yesterday’s valuations for illiquid holdings.

At least they can until new funding rounds for their holdings put the boot of realism in.

Even the ever-popular Scottish Mortgage trust is trading at a discount, reflecting in part uncertainty about its unlisted holdings.

Not a big enough discount in my view, incidentally, given that some other tech trusts that invest purely in the public markets – where prices and hence valuations are nailed-on – are on even greater discounts.

(This illustrates that discounts aren’t just about uncertainty over private valuations. Fearful investor sentiment is also in the mix, and is quite capable of fostering a widening discount.)

Don’t go down on us

Intriguingly, professionals operating in the venture capital sector may be among the strongest voices urging the companies they’ve backed to keep reaching for higher valuations.

Venture capitalists in general abhor what they call a ‘down round’ – fund raising at a valuation lower than the last one achieved.

There are some pertinent reasons for this.

VC managers don’t want to tell their backers that their investments have been marked down but are still going concerns.

It looks bad for one thing.

Worse, flailing investments may well call on additional funding and still end up getting nowhere.

Given the structure of VC returns, you’d probably rather cut bait on losers and double down on winners than back a kennel of declining dogs.

Hence some VCs may prefer to put extra money into a company at a higher valuation – and mark-up their existing holding – rather than get more shares at a lower price. (Otherwise known as a bargain to you and me.)

If the capital markets recover then the higher valuation may become credible again. No harm done!

There can be operational issues with a down round, too. For instance, if you’ve granted options or restricted equity to employees at a higher valuation, then a down round is at the least a headache.

But I think it’s mostly a reputational concern for VCs.

Share options and other incentives can be repriced, after all.

And at the seed stage even the founders (and hence major shareholders) of many of these start-ups live at best a middle-class life, despite owning and running companies valued in the millions.

I knew one who was living in a flatshare despite an (illiquid) multi-million pound shareholding, for example.

The point being that the valuation doesn’t affect the founders’ day-to-day life much, nor their businesses. So if a down round is needed to get money in to keep it going, then I say so be it.

But VCs have different concerns. This sets up some interesting conflicts of interest.

At the least I’d urge any start-up CEOs that read Monevator to cut extraneous headcount and non-core outgoings, in order to reduce your burn rate and extend your runway.

It’s possible the risk aversion we’ve seen in 2022 will abate. And there is still lots of cash sloshing around in the bank accounts of rich people (and some funds for that matter) seeking high returns.

But if you don’t survive until such better times then all that’s moot.

Startup founders smelling the coffee

The good news is there has been more evidence of realism recently, even in the frothy crowdfunding space.

Besides job cuts and hiring freezes, I’m seeing cap table restructuring and the like. This may involve tidying up the crowdfunded investors into less unwieldy or onerous structures.

Doing so could make it easier to raise money in the future from professional investors. It can also cut management cost and hassle by easing communication and decision making.

I suppose there will be cases where small investors give up rights in these restructurings, and it comes back to bite us.

But overall I think it’s a sign that the better management teams are getting their ducks in a line.

Another option some start-ups are pursuing are so-called Convertible rounds.

This article is long enough already, so I won’t go into the mechanics here.

But to over-simplify it’s a way of raising money today without establishing a new valuation. Instead investors get a potential discount on a future conventional raise. (The exact terms vary widely).

Convertibles are appealing to founders and shareholders in a weak market, because they sidestep the drawbacks of a down round.

But there’s a Wiley Coyote running off the cliff element to them.

The convertible has a limited amount of time to, well, convert. At that point money handed over by investors becomes equity. It’s a moment of truth where a valuation is established.

Perhaps the climate for fund raising will look better in six to 12 months. But at the moment it seems to me more likely to be worse.

Inflation is still running rampant, roiling share prices, and increasing the odds for more near-term interest rate hikes – even despite a shifting consensus towards a recession as a consequence.

Don’t fool yourself

Of course much of this gloom depends on whether you believe what the public markets have been saying about valuations for the past year.

If you think the stock market sell-off of growth companies is overdone, maybe you can be more optimistic about unlisted company valuations too.

And the turmoil certainly throws up opportunities, as ever.

For instance last month I was able to grab shares in the fintech investment trust Augmentum, which had briefly plunged far below NAV despite a very cash-heavy portfolio.

And as crowdfunded valuations are adjusted down, more attractive options will emerge there, too.

But right now I am more cautious and pessimistic about private valuations than public ones, for all the reasons we’ve discussed above.

Indeed I’ve applied an additional discount to how I value my existing crowdfunded investments.

This is the opposite of what a professional VC fund would do, as I’ve noted.

And at the other extreme, I know even some readers who crowdfund and angel invest themselves who assume their investments are worthless until they see an exit for cash.

But I’m only answerable to myself.

I don’t see the point of self-delusion by pretending I own assets valued at more than they’re worth.

Equally, I don’t believe they are worthless. (Not least because of the tax benefits.)

I’ll run through this markdown in a future post. Subscribe if you’re interested to ensure you see it!

*Sign-up via our affiliate link to Seedrs and you can get a free £50 investment credit when you invest £500 or more in your first 30 days.

1. That is, its valuation at least doubles and possibly many times more than that [↩]

It’s a hard time to be a risk-averse investor. All the funds in the Monevator model portfolio are burning red and raw. And whereas in previous market beatings our bonds have acted like a shock-absorbing magazine down the trousers, this time they’ve been as much relief as barbed wire underpants.

Let’s cut to the gore. Brought to you in 5D-Nightmare-O-Vision:

The Slow & Steady portfolio is Monevator’s model passive investing portfolio. It was set up at the start of 2011 with £3,000. An extra £1,055 is invested every quarter into a diversified set of index funds, tilted towards equities. You can read the origin story and find all the previous passive portfolio posts tucked away in the Monevator vaults.

Year-to-date the model portfolio is down 10%. In cash terms, we’ve given up one year of growth.

That doesn’t sound so bad… until you slap on 9% inflation. 

In real terms we’re heading into bear country.   

Big picture, that’s still okay. You’ve got to be able to handle bear markets. They run wild at least once a decade. 

But things seem especially grim right now because nothing seems to be working. 

In particular, if you thought bonds were ‘safe’ then the current crash must feel bewildering. Unfortunately, high, unexpected inflation is the bête noire of bonds. 

Long bonds have had a dreadful year so far. 2022 looks like it could inflict scars as deep as 1974’s real loss of -29% or 1916’s -33% on holders of UK gilts.  

Other fixed income sub-asset classes have been various shades of awful, too:

What rampant inflation does to fixed income 

Source: justETF. 7 Dec 2021-9 Jul 2022. (I’ve used representative ETFs for ease of charting).

When high inflation takes the world by surprise this is what you’d expect to see.

Fixed income funds take capital losses because bond prices fall as their yields rise. 

Long duration gilts crash hardest. They’re full of low-yielding bonds with decades to go until they mature, and so their prices fall farthest when their interest rates climb. 

Long-dated index-linked bond funds (labelled ‘long linkers’ on the chart) face-plant for the same reason. They’re stuffed full of low-interest bonds that are uncompetitive versus the higher-yielding bonds now entering the market. So their yields must rise – and their price fall – to bring them back in line. We first warned of the dangers baked into such funds in 2016.  

Short gilt funds are less perturbed by rising yields. Like the other bond funds their holdings are repriced as interest rates rise, hence the small loss we see on the chart. But as their bonds have only a few years left to run, they were already priced closer to their redemption value. This means there’s less scope for capital losses. Moreover the uncompetitive bonds they own will mature sooner and disappear off the books. The fund will recycle the money released into higher-interest paying bonds. Over longer timeframes this process can offset the fund’s capital losses with higher income, bolstering total returns.

Better than nothing

As a bond holder, earning a higher yield will make you better off. But it takes time to recover from the initial price drop.

The higher-yielding bonds we now own are like nanobots. Laying down interest like beads of protein, they’ll eventually seal the hole that was torn in your wealth by rising rates. 

Every bond fund benefits from this same self-regenerating mechanism. But it takes higher-yielding long bond funds more time to redeploy and they have a bigger hole to fill. Hence the greater losses we see.

The upside is that in a stable or falling interest rate environment – such as the past decade – long bond funds eventually outperform their shorter-dated brethren. (Something to look forward to again, someday.)

A medium or intermediate gilt fund (labelled ‘medium’ on the graph) is a muddy compromise sitting between the long and short bond paths charted above. 

Even short index-linked bond funds (labelled ‘short linkers’) suffer capital losses from rising yields. When those falls overwhelm their inflation-adjusted interest payments, the funds disappoint despite the inflationary backdrop. 

That’s what’s happening right now with the Short Duration Global Index Linked fund in the Slow & Steady portfolio. 

We’d prefer it to stiffen against inflation immediately like a bulletproof vest. Unfortunately we must do some bleeding first.

At least our linker fund is less bad than most of our other holdings. (How’s that for a glowing recommendation?)

Cash is like an extremely short-dated bond, hence there are no capital losses in the chart. That’s as good as it gets in the current moment. Though obviously cash is still down after inflation. 

No good choices

While long and medium government bond funds will unfortunately be a liability if market interest rates continue to rise, you’ll thank god for them if the economy tips into a deep recession. (Of the non-stagflationary variety). 

That’s why you’d be wrong to throw your medium bond holdings onto the fire.

You might be cursing your luck if you’ve recently been burned. But you shouldn’t question your need for diversification. For an escape pod with a decent chance of working when the wheel of fortune suddenly spins again. 

Personally I’ve felt like a bystander caught in a Mexican standoff for a while now. Trapped between the cocked pistols of rising rates, market shocks, and inflated asset prices.

There was no way out without getting hurt. 

The best we could do was advocate a multi-layered defence against the uncertainty: 

• 60% Global equities (growth)
• 10% High-quality intermediate government bonds (recession resistant)
• 10% High-quality index-linked government bonds (inflation resistant)
• 10% Cash (liquidity and optionality)
• 10% Gold (extra diversification)

A young, risk-tolerant investor should probably opt for more in equities and allow future decades of compounding to smooth out the potholes in the road. 

Ready for anything

There seems a reasonable probability that higher inflation will stink the place up for longer than most of us imagined 18-months ago. 

If that’s so, then our portfolios are in for a hard time. 

But don’t mistake probability for certainty. 

The masters of the universe didn’t see inflation coming. They said it was transitory. Now it could herald regime change. 

They don’t know and neither do we.

So keep your options option. 

New transactions

Every quarter we buy £1,055 of shots for our portfolio punch bowl. Our poison is split between seven funds, as per our predetermined asset allocation.

We rebalance using Larry Swedroe’s 5/25 rule. That hasn’t been activated this quarter.

These are our trades:

UK equity

Vanguard FTSE UK All-Share Index Trust – OCF 0.06%

Fund identifier: GB00B3X7QG63

New purchase: £52.75

Buy 0.234 units @ £225.24

Target allocation: 5%

Developed world ex-UK equities

Vanguard FTSE Developed World ex-UK Equity Index Fund – OCF 0.14%

Fund identifier: GB00B59G4Q73

New purchase: £390.35

Buy 0.78 units @ £500.22

Target allocation: 37%

Global small cap equities

Vanguard Global Small-Cap Index Fund – OCF 0.29%

Fund identifier: IE00B3X1NT05

New purchase: £52.75

Buy 0.145 units @ £363.39

Target allocation: 5%

Emerging market equities

iShares Emerging Markets Equity Index Fund D – OCF 0.19%

Fund identifier: GB00B84DY642

New purchase: £84.40

Buy 45.867 units @ £1.84

Target allocation: 8%

Global property

iShares Global Property Securities Equity Index Fund D – OCF 0.17%

Fund identifier: GB00B5BFJG71

New purchase: £52.75

Buy 22.265 units @ £2.37

Target allocation: 5%

UK gilts

Vanguard UK Government Bond Index – OCF 0.12%

Fund identifier: IE00B1S75374

New purchase: £305.95

Buy 2.01 units @ £151.93

Target allocation: 29%

Global inflation-linked bonds

Royal London Short Duration Global Index-Linked Fund – OCF 0.27%

Fund identifier: GB00BD050F05

New purchase: £116.05

Buy 106.273 units @ £1.09

Dividends reinvested: £80.72 (Buys another 73.92 units)

Target allocation: 11%

New investment = £1,055

Trading cost = £0

Platform fee = 0.35% per annum.

This model fund portfolio is notionally held with Charles Stanley Direct. Take a look at our online broker table for cheaper platform options if you use a different mix of funds. InvestEngine is even cheaper if you’re happy to invest in ETFs only.

Average portfolio OCF = 0.16%

If all this seems too much like hard work then you can buy a diversified portfolio using an all-in-one fund such as Vanguard’s LifeStrategy series.

Interested in tracking your own portfolio or using the Slow & Steady investment tracking spreadsheet? This piece on portfolio tracking shows you how.

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

Politics this week. Feel free to skip to the week’s best money and investing links!

I voted for Boris Johnson, to the horror of wiser friends.

Not for prime minister and deliverer-in-chief of a Brexit even he didn’t really believe in. By the time of the General Election his conniving was already enough for me to see even the unpalatable Jeremy Corbyn as an elder statesman by contrast.

Rather, for Mayor of London a few years previously.

I thought London would benefit from his charisma. The quotes from the Iliad made me feel smarter. I was bored by career politicians and their clichés designed not to inspire you but to have you mentally tick a box and move on without thinking.

And I was once in a room with him. He drew all eyes like a matinee idol.

All the more impressive given he plainly isn’t. Rather, like a sorrowful dog who keeps pissing on your carpet, Johnson’s entire demeanor seems a conspiracy of nature that’s been optimized for forgiveness.

You want to ruffle his hair. To sigh. Oh Boris!

An aunt of mine – a tribal Labour voter – even expressed pity as she watched an apparently now tragic Johnson finally get prised out of office this week, with all the grace of a limpet coming off a rock.

My relative had forgotten he’d won the position in his own coup – taking his shot after Theresa May had been slightly more honest about the realities of leaving the EU, and in doing so breaking the first rule of Brexit.

(Brexit rule #1: never tell the truth about Brexit.)

My aunt became angry again when she was reminded about the hypocritical parties in lockdown. And the lies afterwards.

Good riddance, she said.

Still – she had to be reminded.

It ain’t half hot mum

Once you see through it, Johnson’s charisma makes him dangerous.

The pull is still there – you can feel it needling you. But it’s more the villainous appeal of The Joker.

Long-time readers know I would never forgive him for his self-serving machinations around Brexit. For standing up and saying what he knew was nonsense to an electorate whipped up on conspiracies about experts, immigration, and alienation.

But it beggars belief that those who voted for him to supposedly ‘take back control’ can look at the post-Referendum years through anything other than their fingers.

Short of doomsday scenarios, it could hardly have gone worse. The trashing of our institutions. The purging of the Tory party. The daily fabrications. Britain threatening to renege on its international deals like a tinpot dictatorship.

Come back Brussels. All is forgiven.

That Johnson still has defenders shouldn’t be surprising, but I just can’t help it.

Do Leavers have some kind of Stockholm Syndrome?

I suppose if you are one of the few who only voted us out because you feared Britain would become a vassal state of a remote EU bureaucracy, then some melancholy feeling is understandable.

Johnson did take us out of the EU.

So if you looked at the long list of problems facing humanity and decided bogus edicts about bendy bananas from across the channel were the biggest threat to your grandchildren, you got what you wanted.

Everyone else should think again.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Some people – on both sides – are claiming that Johnson didn’t even really ‘Get Brexit Done’.

Not me.

Brexit was always a word cloud of contradictory aspirations.

No immigration. Skilled immigration.

Less regulation about working conditions. Higher wages for workers. 

New foreign trade opportunities for companies. Gummed-up trade with the EU. 

Singapore-on-the-Thames for the 21st Century. Factory Britain from the 19th.

Economic gains for the taking. Economic pain as the price worth paying.

You could make almost any change and call it Brexit – while pissing off a contingent who’d voted for some other version.

Certainly the Tories didn’t need to go Full Monty Brexit, although it was probably inevitable once Johnson had stuck the knife into both May and her slightly saner deal for his own ends.

Remember that staying in the Single Market and/or the Customs Union was once touted as a feature of some versions of Brexit, not a bug.

But political calculus and reconciling an impossible mandate meant Johnson and Co. went for a Hard Brexit – Irish absurdities and all.

Finally we left the EU.

So yes, Johnson got Brexit done.

Dad’s Army

True, even Brexit’s most ardent cheerleaders have yet to identify almost any commensurate benefits beyond (for them) the end to free movement.

Absolutely the independent trade deals we’ve done are inconsequential.

Of course Brexit has inflicted real and lasting damage to the UK economy – let alone its standing on the world stage.

But none of that is indicative of Brexit not getting done. On the contrary, it’s exactly what we should have expected.

I will concede that immigration into the UK has held up better post-Brexit than I feared it would, though the numbers are likely still muddled by the pandemic.

But that’s been the only positive surprise so far. (And given that a significant minority of Leave voters were motivated by immigration, they might feel differently about the uptick, anyway.)

I’m also aware that some Remainers thought Brexit would drive the UK economy off a cliff, which didn’t happen.

But you will look in vain for me predicting that.

Rather, I see Brexit as insidious because it drains vitality from our economy all over the place, like so many tics on a dog.

More trade friction here. Inward investment that goes elsewhere. A farmer ploughing his unpicked crops into a field. A student who doesn’t get an internship in Europe. Tedious border checks for anyone who works abroad.

A weaker pound and higher interest rates, risking stagflation.

Drip, drip, drip.

And all for what?

Most obviously: the loss of our right to live, work, and retire anywhere in a beautiful and rich continent among 450 million other human beings.

That those who voted this freedom away don’t care about it – and have given us nothing good in return – is most galling of all.

It’s a knockout

Indeed you’d hope that finally Leave voters would at least reassess their views about Brexit in light of the past few years.

Two of its chief enablers – Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson – long ago turned on each other.

People who lied there would be £350m more a week for the NHS couldn’t even come clean about partying in a pandemic.

If I’d followed this lot into Brexit hoping for some phantasmagorical economic boon – let alone superior politics – I’d be absolutely steaming.

But the polls are less than conclusive.

How the government is handling the issue of Brexit in the UK

Nearly a third of Britons still think Brexit is being handled well. I guess for most of them it’s a case of ‘better out than in’ – however stinky the consequences.

But those who were on the fence or who believed there could be net economic benefits are welcome to change their minds.

I saw through Johnson and his nonsense. Others can still do the same – and reassess his toxic legacy of Brexit.

At least if Johnson was our Poundshop Trump, we’ve dodged the equivalent of the 6 January attacks.

Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid deserve some thanks. Better late than never.

Democracy has many flaws but it has one supreme virtue, which is enabling a peaceful transition.

Similarly, my faint hope is the Conservative party will turn itself back into a party of the center again. It’s hard to recall that its Brexiteers were once a pretty ridiculous fringe faction that all-but blamed the EU for the rain in Manchester.

Can control be wrested away their fantasy politics? We’ll see.

As for Johnson, goodbye and good riddance indeed.

https://twitter.com/jondharvey/status/1545030371846361089?s=21&t=x0bHFF6JB01Y_BTedSROsg

House keeping: Errata and MIA subscribers

The email version of our article on the Best Cash ISAs on Tuesday featured a pretty annoying typo.

It should have stated that you can put £4,000 a year into a Lifetime ISA.

Huge apologies for any confusion caused. I’d sack the offending sub-editor but unfortunately it was me, and I have an article to write for next week so we’ll have to soldier on.

Also, a half-a-dozen readers have contacted me over the past couple of weeks to report that they’ve subscribed to get our posts as emails but, well, they are not getting our emails.

In all these cases they were in our system but marked as ‘bounced’.

When a reader reports their email is on the contrary alive and kicking, I can put them back onto the distribution list.

So if you’ve subscribed yet your email box is untroubled by us, you might be in this boat too.

Check your spam folder first (the ignominy!) and double-check you didn’t subscribe with another email address. After that, drop me a line via our Contact box (link top-right) stating the email address in question.

Have a great weekend everyone. The country is in a mess, but at least a window for change has opened.

[continue reading…]