It is a beautiful June morning with hundreds of Canadian geese on the river; and a single black and white swan.
My partner is sailing off the coast of Portugal and I am seeing allegories in the combinations of wildfowl beneath me as I read an article from Mary McDougall
We complain here in Eton about the Canadian geese who dominate the river Thames. The white swans are owned by the City (Mercer) and the King but struggle. Smaller and most unloved is the black swan, smaller and lonely, rejected by swans, geese and ducks.
I make up stories (allegories) for my own consumption but the parallels with the waterfowl and the river life are there for a fertile minds. Here is a lesser spotted woodpecker who has just arrived to remind me of the tapper’s place in the aviary.
So what am I thinking?
The Plowman was the only commentator at 5 am this morning. His thoughts were of his partner sailing with lifelong pension friends down the Portugal coast to the Mediterranean. Britain’s links with Europe are stronger than can be broken by a Brexit.
The wildfowl on the river in front of me as I type are from Canada and many of the tourists who share the beauty of Windsor and Berkshire will share their countries with us because we are still a Commonwealth.
We do not deny inward investment nor do they deny us investing in their economies, there is no tariff on long-term investments whether in our own country or in those of Europe and of those we once called ours. Our hatred of wars is stronger now we have learned what the benefits of peace can be, it is 80 years since we saw the world at war.
The FT is pretty clear about what it sees,
Aware Super’s bet on European assets comes as some big investors have started to shift away from US markets in response to Donald Trump’s erratic trade policies and worries about the country’s increasing debt pile. The US dollar fell to a three-year low against a basket of currencies this week.
Trump’s landmark “big, beautiful” budget bill has created further uncertainty, with proposals for new taxes targeting foreign investors in the US. Graham said he was “very very focused on” understanding the potential impact on the fund, which could amount to tens of millions of dollars.
He said that while the US would remain a “large and important market” for Aware Super and other major pension funds, “there’s a question mark over how much goes there into the medium and long term . . . I do think there will be a rebalancing”.
Australia and Canada are quoted in the article wanting to increase allocations to Britain and Europe. Blackstone, the largest alternative investment house on the planet is not politically biased in its investment strategy. It is a black swan.
The FT brings Blackstone to its article
private capital group Blackstone prepares to significantly increase its investments across the region, betting that economic reforms will help revive growth.
The group with $1.2tn in assets said this week it would aim to invest “at least $500bn” in Europe in the coming decade, highlighting Germany’s decision to relax its borrowing rules to finance infrastructure and defence investment as a positive change.
Other pension funds have turned to Europe in recent months.
“We are starting to see a lot of interesting things in European private equity — the opportunities there are growing,” said Aaron Bennett, chief investment officer of Canada’s University Pension Plan, adding that governments were starting to do “some difficult but necessary things to improve their long-term economic competitiveness”.
My final allegory is of a picture of a black and white swan living together with many other fowls. Two nights ago , a swan was sick on the river and the other swans drew round it outside my house. A swan lifeline team came and took the dying swan away,another allegory of harmony rather than discord , of peace not war.
I hope we can learn from the allegories of nature and of the behaviour of people when they are in contact with their planet. We cannot have war, we cannot even have tariffs, we must work together. We need to “build businesses that power tomorrow’s economy”.
A lot of Canadian geese in town today!
But we get typical
scaremongering from
would-be regulators like EIOPA:
http://www.europeanpensions.net/ep/Market-turmoil-implications-on-IORP-funding-ratios-require-attention-EIOPA-says.php
When will they ever learn sometimes to say nothing, instead of always saying something?
I prefer critiques by such as Dick Roche, a former Irish minister for European affairs:
“EIOPA is a small agency with roughly 200 staff. Changing its remit by making it responsible for policing cross-border insurance activity or expanding its involvement in industry practices such as quota share insurance will require considerable upscaling.
“There are, however, issues of more significance than EIOPA’s size: questions as to its competence, judgment, and performance.
“While EIOPA produces a constant flow of publications, much of it rather self-congratulatory, very little of that output provides material for a full qualitative review of its performance.”
As well
as being a would-be regulator, EIOPA now wants to be a central
data hub.
“The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) has called for a centralised approach to pensions and insurance data collection across the EU, warning that ‘fragmented’ national practices are hindering the single market.
“In its response to the European Commission’s consultation on the integration of EU capital markets, EIOPA said that it could ‘act as a central data hub – both receiving from and providing access to all national competent authorities (NCAs) across both the insurance and pensions sectors’.”