A reader emailed me yesterday thanking me for my overview of the ins-and-outs of absolute return funds, but wondering if I knew where they’d all emerged from.
As a long-time UK investor, “N.W.” said he’d heard similar promises from funds before, but he’d been struck by how both the term “absolute return fund” and advertising for such funds had proliferated in recent years.
My regular roundup of the week’s blog and financial site links.
I am going to start highlighting a blog post that made me think each week, followed by a quick personal response. I’d like to put the emphasis back on the excellent sites out there.
Wealth Pilgrim found out this week that his buddy doesn’t do the dishes.
A couple of readers have asked what I thought of the one-off levy on bonuses announced in the pre-budget report, given that I’ve advocated here and elsewhere a windfall tax.
To be honest it’s become such a mainstream topic that I wasn’t sure Monevator readers would want more opinion / hot air on the subject, especially as I have no special insight beyond common sense.
From the earliest days of the credit crisis I believed the financial services industry should pay a price for their collective greed and idiocy. That has happened, with companies like Northern Rock, Lehman’s, Merrill Lynch, and HBOS all going belly up, amongst many others.
I also wanted the culpable to pay on an individual level, and there’s far less evidence that this has happened.
From Fred the Shred getting his multi-million pound pay-off down to 28-year old traders on a million a year who loaded their banks up with lousy debt and have mostly been re-hired by rivals – even if they were booted out in 2008 – to take part in this year’s credit bonanza, most bankers haven’t done badly from the crisis at all.
I thought yesterday’s pre-budget report was a feeble response to the Government’s ongoing £178 billion-a-year borrowing binge.
These are unprecedented times, true. But that means they call for an unprecedented, apolitical response that we could swallow hard on but stomach, not a pre-budget report that sounded more like Rimmer from Red Dwarf doing the bowling club’s finances.
