There are trillions of pounds available for investment in the UK. More than £700 billion is saved in ISAs, much of it in cash, and there is much more in pension funds, again with significant amounts of cash being held, as I noted in an article on Substack yesterday.
The problem is not, then, that there is a shortage of funds in the UK economy. We do, in fact, have an excess, or glut, of savings that are serving no useful purpose.
What the government needs to do now is act as the intermediary for the supply of capital from savings through the creation of regional investment banks, funded by government-backed bonds, subject to a government guarantee, as deposits in banks already are, in which it should be required that new ISAs and some pension contributions should be saved.
The government is now going to fund the new local greengrocer. That’ll work out real well, right?
First thing we need to do is make all future government employee pension contributions investment-based, and apply this rule to them first. As a trial, so we can see how well it works,
That is a bloody good idea.
Since I’m a RETIRED government bureaucrat, I’ve no problem if FUTURE pensions are pissed away like this!!
How can he believe the cash he has noticed is doing nothing? Even cash isas pay interest so that cash is loaned to somebody for investment already. And the isas and pensions are there for a purpose, to serve the holders’ personal needs. Not those of the fat controller.
It is in his definition of “useful” [defined in 1984 by the Ministry of Truth “useful is that which advances belief in Big Brother and his beneficience”]
He knows it isn’t really doing nothing but pretending it isn’t is a pretext for theft.
Correct. He just wants it. He doesn’t really care if it is ‘serving no useful purpose.’ A commie trick to get people to accept theft.
“Even cash isas pay interest so that cash is loaned to somebody for investment”
He claims not. His claim is that banks create all the money they need for loans, through double-entry bookkeeping, and so deposits, cash ISAs etc. do not result in loans.
This, as Martin says, gives him an excuse to call for these funds to be taken by the State and used by politicians.
But what I’m never sure about is whether he knows he’s talking nonsense and just does it because it helps his cause (as Martin says), or if he’s genuinely too thick to understand and too pompous to accept what anyone else has written on the subject.
Me with new small business idea:
But family won’t touch it
Friends think it will lose them money
That website for crowdfunding a start up won’t seed me
The bank algo sniggered at the business plan
But Spud
Will get government to stake on my start again
Yep. The commie doesn’t even understand how entrepreneurship works.
If it *did* invest in the local greengrocer, there might be some quality control – a sudden appearance of a Tesla accompanied by the disappearance of carrots would be noticed by the bureaucrats’ wives.
Sadly the historic record of state-run (regional- or industry-focussed) investment banks has been appallingly bad. All those I was asked to investigate had been bankrupt for at least a couple of years (probably longer because historic accounts couldn’t be trusted).
In practice, if the politicians’ wives (funny how that description can be used on a singular politician these days) did notice, they would be told to shut up as noticing new, luxury cars could be racist. The politicians pointedly looked the other way as quality learing centers with no pupils and hospices where people never died popped up. It all went very swimmingly, the politicians got votes and the proprietors got other peoples’ money. Then some prodnose conservative reporter came along and spoiled it all.
I am in England: my greengrocer and all the guys/gals working on his stall in the local market are white. I cannot remember a brown greengrocer in 75 years (I didn’t do the shopping before that).
Guess it depends on your area but Turkish grocers (mainly Cypriot I think, also lots of Greek Cypriot ones) seem pretty widespread and I’ve seen a lot of Pakistani ones too. That’s just “traditional” British style grocers. Extend it to “ethnic” grocers who specialise in more exotic fruit+veg and you’d have to add a lot of Chinese, Africans, Indians, Latin Americans etc. Obviously fine line between an ethnic grocers and ethnic supermarket but I’m thinking of places that specialise in fruit+veg.
If you have a search online for “top greengrocers in London” like those used by celebrity chefs etc and you’ll see it’s not exactly very Anglo. Natoora was founded by an Argentinian, Newington Fruit and Veg is I think Turkish, Fruity Fresh is Gujarati, Andreas Veg is (Greek) Cypriot.
I don’t live in London any more; I am willing to accept that things may have changed in the last thirty-odd years. I merely stated a fact.
I appreciate my second paragraph was London oriented but the first paragraph applies everywhere else I’ve lived in the UK too. Lot of migrant families who came in to London, Manchester, Birmingham or the old mill towns – or whose parents did – are moving out into the commuter belts and market towns. Theo pointed out how Suffolk is changing, last time I walked round Grantham I wondered what Maggie would make of the radical transformation – particularly the complexion of the schoolkids. There are places as yet largely unreached. But one of the first things that pops up once a community forms is the food shops, and if they still need to sell to the natives to pay their way then a grocers with a few unusual wares for sale is a decent, and common, business model.
Never having seen an Asian greengrocer just seemed such a funny thing to say – not disputing the veracity, just amusing how two people living in the same country can have such a different lived experience. Particularly when the Turkish or Pakistani grocer is a full-blown stereotype at this point, depending on which part of Britain you hail from. It’s a bit like someone saying “I’ve never seen an Asian taxi driver” – which in parts of the country is quite plausible, even though it would be astonishing to most of the UK population.
There are quite a few Indian shopkeepers.
Yeah, some of the local stores around me are actually Sri Lankan or Pakistani. Mind you the “Indian restaurants” are actually Bangladeshi.
But I’ve been in very white market towns where some of the F+V stalls at the market are Asian too. So it’s not just the shops!
Here in rural Somerset/Dorset, a few years ago the village shop became Asian (India/Paki?).
Newington F&V. Newington Green? Little Istambul. Andreas V. Further up Green Lanes at a guess. I very likely know him. These days it’s quite hard to think of a Brit F&V.
I learned a long time ago to avoid markets for F & V.* It rarely keeps. They’re all buying from the same places. But the market traders don’t have the storage & handling conditions shops do. For best quality a large supermarket chain. Best logistics. You can be buying it the day after it left the farm.
*Particularly “farmers’ markets”. Middle class tosser trap, they are.
As far as I can tell there are no white British grocers in my area at all. None.
The F & V on the Broadway near Budgens gone or changed? That was there for years. There used to a stall on the corner of Coleridge Road but that went around 2000. The shop opposite the gas station was never much cop. Kurdish? Don’t suppose Muswell Hill’s much better these days. But there’s plenty in Green Lane if you can park. Don’t do what I did. Walk round the corner by the post office when the Kurds opened up with automatic weapons. There were bullets flying up & down Green Lanes, shop windows disintegrating…
No it isn’t available for investment. It’s future money not today money. It doesn’t exist yet.
My money used to be kept in a shoe box at my local bank. But that branch has closed now and they wont tell me where my shoe box has gone.
I blame AI.
Your money’s in Bill’s house, and in Fred’s house.
Give me back my money!
According to this “Not the Nine O’Clock News” sketch, it’s very bad news for you if your shoe box is stolen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbKUv0701vE
I asked Al and he said that the money in my bank account is just a big pile of notes on a shelf in the banks vault. It just sits there until I want some and they open the vault and give me my own notes back. I think Al is wrong – It’s definitely a very small pile of notes on my shelf.
Al doesnt know where the bank got the money to lend to my mate for his mortgage though.
There’s a Paddington story where he thinks that, and gets most upset when he checks the serial numbers on the notes and discovers that they are not the ones he paid in.
In other words, we used to explain this to 7 year olds and expect them to understand it.
Pensions and retirement savings plans have had bullseyes on them for years. No one can accumulate a decent sized account without someone else arguing that in a fair and just world they should be able to take it and spend it as they think proper. I sometimes think that a primary reason that people often become more conservative as they age is that they come to understand that they need to protect themselves and what they’ve built from those who think they should never have been allowed to build it..
Oz superannuation under management is north of the $4 trillion mark, by virtue of it being compulsory. It’s hard to get through a week without someone suggesting that directing funds to ‘invest’ in this, that, or other good cause would be worthwhile. Usually with associated twaddle about social benefits, multipliers, value capture, and like. Or theft, as I like to call it. I’m not one to fiddle around switching funds willy nilly, I’m an annual review kind of guy, but if my fund starts talking about renewables or social housing investment I might be out the door.
Herr Professor Oberststurmbannfuehrer Kartoffel
Keep your grubby mitts off my money. Just because you have none doesn’t give you, or anyone else the right to determine what gets done with it. Any attempt to do so will result in a swift kick to the goolies.
Yours sincerely
Henry Crun
As far as serving no useful purpose goes, he should cut off his head and get rid of ten pounds of ugly fat.
Savings serve no purpose?
Does he only eat in restaurants? No food in the terrace? He has no money in the bank? He only lives day to day?
He is 68 and appealing for donations on his blog. He obviously can’t afford to retire, so he must have made some pretty bad decisions with his own pension.
I think he had a pensionectomy courtesy of a certain libel plaintiff……..
Good thinking but you cannot have a pensionectomy: under English Law pensions may not be assigned.
It is possible that he remains in debt having failed to pay his debts to Lord Ashcroft and/or lawyers.
You can’t have the whole lot taken away, but you can take out 25% of it when you reach, what, 55?
But a quick Google tells me that, in 2009, when Murphy lost his libel action, the minimum age for taking your pension lump sum was just 50.
How old was Murphy in 2009? He must have been close to 50.
Edit: he claims here that he didn’t pay Ashcroft’s legal fees, just the Crimestoppers ‘donation’:
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/11/10/the-media-really-does-need-to-be-objective-about-trump-and-the-bbc/
Having just looked it up, he lost his libel action on 22nd May 2009 (or that’s when it was reported.
We’ve just missed the anniversary; should we celebrate it in future?
“so he must have made some pretty bad decisions ”
Not just his pension.
If I had put all my self-employed# pension contributions into a National Savings account I should still have enough to live in a-little-more-than-modest comfort. Leaving his wife for a NHS GP seems to have been a pretty *awful* one: it would appear that he was far being from the star earner in Murphy, Deeks, Nolan.
#I should admit that my occupational pension from the first two-fifths of my working life is enough to pay the bills except for the foreign holidays that my wife demands – and pays for. Nevertheless my point is that my state pension and the capital paid *into* my “personal pension” would be enough to live on.
Possibly harsh – I think his two sons have moved back in after university, one of them after a Local Auth graduate programme which didn’t work out, and he wants to pay them the legal minimum wage and the employment taxes arising.
Spud is doing fine, wife owns house, no rent to pay, he’s got the state retirement pension and previous occupational pensions. Not enough to instal a heat pump or buy an EV, but they’d be bad value for almost any owner of an end terrace. He earns effective £2-£3 an hour for 60 hours a week, but it’s giving the boys a leg up that’s costing.
A nominal 16 hours per week each plus employer’s NI is a bit less than £500, his state pension would cover half of that.
But you are saying that he is paying two sons to sit at home and do nothing (or at least nothing worthwhile) in order to fake their CVs …
What pension funds hold a significant proportion in cash?