The news is pretty flabbergasting – we aren’t spending, we must be spending , spending , spending

Deciphering this puzzle is a priority for policymakers at the Bank of England. If consumers do not start spending soon, the central bank will need to rethink its growth and inflation forecasts, with implications for the path of interest rates.  “We have persistently projected the saving ratio to fall, but we are yet to see this play out in a sustained way,” Catherine Mann, a BoE rate-setter, said last week, calling it a “large judgment call” that made the outlook for UK GDP unusually uncertain.

My worry is that we are having to spend on things that are going up a lot -power charges – food and drink, restaurants and bars  and most of all on our taxes and national insurance. Spending on those things is probably why we don’t seem to have any love for our Government and are throwing our hand in with Reform UK.

The misery with which we are awaiting next month’s budget is unparalleled. We are expecting to lose tax free cash, pay national insurance on our pension payments and hand over the money in out pension pot that would have kept our houses passing to the next generation.

House prices haven’t gone up  but council taxes are going up much faster than inflation.

Bizarrely , the one portfolio of investments that is going up are equities (not bonds). Those who are invested in bonds for the future are in clover – whether they invest home or away. But what I hear is a gloom that the healthy quoted stock markets are about to hit buffers (we had a little correction on Friday – experts chortle that they have predicted it) not even the good news is received with a smile.

The FT reckons that we have taken to take all news as bad news, this good thing – AI is being interpreted with the enthusiasm of the Luddites for the Spinning Jenny

I am getting the same feedback on the potential improvements in pensions from the Pension Schemes Bill and the soon to be published CDC rules that will make it accessible to most of us (in time).

Instead we have insurance to protect us from living too long, expose ourselves to the long term growth of equities and de-risk our institutional DB funds that are threatening to run away with their surpluses and distribute them to members and reinvest them in growth in the companies that were starved of cash for most of the last quarter. There is nothing about investing anymore.

As a nation we want to save, save ,save and yet we are making saving miserable. Let’s hope that this Labour Government can at least make saving – long term saving – something we get rewarded for. Right now we are saving and hating the pensions we are saving into, that can’t be right.