Worldwide Financial Planning

It has dawned on me, that many sub forty year olds have never experienced a mortgage when rates were near their average, let alone at 16%.

This week markets have been reeling from a barrage of political events.

With consumer debt (car finance, personal loans, credit cards) standing at a staggering £200 billion,(1) could any of its sectors trigger that little moment when we just watch it all click away through the economy as a whole, as the financial crisis of 2007 showed?

For some, the words buy to let ‘landlord’ might drag us back to the Feudal system from which it was derived, and give the meaning: ‘the bad man in top hat with lots of money’. For others, it’s the person doing their best to stay alive in an ever-problematic, heavily taxed and low interest rate environment.

Minutes from the ECB's January monetary policy meeting have confirmed that fears of Trumpian dollar manipulation and currency wars keep Mario Draghi awake at night.

Meanwhile, Fed officials are more concerned than investors had thought about the pace of the country's growth.

In one week, leading newspapers commented ‘inflation has peaked’ (therefore rates don’t have to rise) followed a week later by ‘interest rates have to rise to protect against rising inflation’.