FTSE 100 Financial Times Stock Exchange Index United Kingdom
The U.K. stock market is on its “uppers,” that is to say on its last legs. It is so bad that people have stopped being in denial about it and are scrambling for solutions.
In a nutshell, the U.K. government around 2000 pushed pension funds to put their money into government bonds rather than have them have a mix of stocks and bonds to provide for the future of pension payments. There was before that, the sort of exposure to stocks that you see in other countries or even in a personal savings plan, but the government mandated pension funds had to go pretty much all bonds or else. Of course, the bonds in question were government bonds so in effect government was doing a pension raid, a common theme in the U.K., which follows the bank robber’s logic of raiding where the big money is. So rather than the citizen gaining the benefit of exposure to equities, the…
