For those who wanted to come to the session of the Pension PlayPen yesterday, here are video and slides curated by Ashok Gupta with Will Hutton. Bearing in mind how much they have in common (including age) I am surprised they didn’t know each other before the coffee morning.
Ashok – the gentleman on the right, ran us through the slides following quoting the extent of wealth in UK pensions and long term savings.
Ashok has been working on investment systems all his life. Asset owners are responsible for UK savers but it’s the UK firms who pay into workplace pensions who make the system work.
And this leads to social productivity in all the areas listed. We should be doing all this ourselves but we rely on overseas capital out of all proportion, because our money is not working for us.
The 
The six trillion investment system diverts money away from the UK and to everywhere else.
In the 1970s when we had exchange controls keeping investment into the UK , we may not have the tax credits pensions enjoyed til 1997. Taken over the last 50 years the advantages of investing in the UK has diminished.
They may be governed as 5,000 schemes but they follow each other in investment. But the fragmentation means that the big schemes are ok, medium schemes are consolidated to insurance and the small schemes languish unloved
As for DC, what is going into Britain from an investment in the MSCI global index? We own more in Apple than in the UK.
Gupta would like 80% + of investment to be new investment into companies that need fresh money. Instead the shares of large companies are traded on secondary markets
There is a positive direction of travel, but it is too slow. Gupta and Hutton hope that Haldane will influence Burnham to accelerate the redirection of pension money to grow the country’s economy.
This is a crucial time. We must stop crunching what should be patient capital into the impatient capital of secondary markets.
We must stop sending what we produce from the £6 Trillion UK Growth Engine away from the UK and to the Rest of World and Emerging Markets.
If you want to download the whole pack of slides , the link is here.
Click “Accept All” by scrolling down on this frame to see the slides without download.
More could follow to explain Will Hutton which can’t be grounded in slides but goes beyond them in words that anyone familiar with his books will recognise.
