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!