This blog’s good friend Jnamdoc has read the words of Tom Tugendhat in the FT and on this blog

Here is his comment

Welcome to the ball Mr Tugendhat, better late than never.

De-risking provides a false sense of security to the Boomers and those of the Left who view the world through entitlements and a belief that there will magically always be someone or something to tax, rather than a concern with the inputs that drive an economy. And quite simply if there is no growth, then the effect of all of these de-risked pensions will have been to de-risk through disinvestment an entire economic system leaving it unable to generate the incomes to pay the taxes to pay the gilts needed to pay any of these (so called) de-risked pensions.

It is only ever young people who can pay pensions to us in our non-productive later years.

Re-read Professor John Kay’s December 2024 paper on what he labels the biggest policy disaster in British political and economic history ( it is!), and also then the Hymans Holistic discussion piece (lead author Calum Cooper) of March 2025 for the solutions, if only our political classes (obsessed with the short term newsfeed) had the courage and a sense of responsibility !?

My job is not to make people sad but to give them optimism. Thanks to Dennis Leach for his excellent contribution this January in a blog on the work of John Kay –  “where we went wrong with pensions”.

Here is the link to the important article by John Kay

https://t.co/vUfz0XtzAs Subject of this morning’s blog – a virtuoso essay by John Kay

— Henry Tapper (@henryhtapper) January 16, 2025

What is needed is not just intellectual rigour: we also need to understand (as John Kay’s article makes crystal clear) that today’s mainstream economics has forgotten what we once knew to be true – much of which we learned from John Maynard Keynes in the the 1930s.

Mainstream economics has become blinded to empirical truth about how the economy works in the real world by its obsessive need to cast all its thinking in terms of mathematical rigour. It leads it to focus on a narrative that focuses exclusively on the supply side as if the economy were a household; this is particularly true of Johnson’s IFS.

John Kay will finally give his talk at the Merchant Taylor’s Hall for the CISI , several months after it was originally billed. Health is a fragile thing, I was in hospital in November and December , a close work colleague is in hospital with Legionnaires Disease.

But we make it through to the other side as Kay has and it is the robust fortitude of Jnamdoc, Leech, my friend and John Kay that give me hope for the future of pensions!