Dorkins

Amazing, thanks for posting this.

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This is wrong. Yield is a function of both labour and capital i.e. with more capital you can get more yield from the same labour input. People with DC pensions are investing in the creation of new capital, the idea being that when they retire there will be additional future yield due to that capital investment that they can then take as an income to live on in retirement. Most public sector DB pensions (there are exceptions e.g. USS) are entirely unfunded - there is zero capital investment being created to fund the future liabilities, they are pure IOUs from the (future) taxpayer.

I know there are other threads on this but bumping this one for old time's sake. UK 10 year Gilt back over 4%:

Yes, the fundamental problem with using mobile data as the sole option for real world out-and-about stuff like car parking is that the mobile data infrastructure is still a bit shaky.

I was wondering when day to day life would start to become impossible/impractical without a smartphone full of apps, it hasn't quite happened yet but this would certainly be a step in that direction. It's a shame that putting SIM cards in laptops never really became a thing. I'd much rather use a laptop to access a website via a browser than install a load of apps on a smartphone.

Good. Cheaper equities are exactly what you want if you're in the asset accumulation phase of life.

From the MSE site: So pretty much historically normal mortgages interest rates then.

Agreed. My guess is Hunt will go to £60k annual allowance, £1.5m lifetime allowance and some monkeying around to make it easier to contribute if you've already started withdrawing your pension (current annual allowance £4k in that situation) but let's see.

More briefing of newspapers that Hunt is planning to increase both the annual and lifetime pension allowances: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/mar/10/pension-jeremy-hunt-raise-cap-budget-lifetime-allowance

Sorry, I meant the fixed payment from the government to households (£67ish a month I think) which has been happening all winter and is about to end

When occupational pensions became much less generous and switched from defined benefit to defined contribution 2-3 decades ago workers really should have cranked up their pension contributions towards something like 25% of gross income to compensate but they just didn't. Now most under-50s are on a glide path to retirement that will leave them with £50-100k in their DC pension pots at state pension age if they are lucky. Given that the state pension has an annuity value of something like £300-400k it's likely the median pensioner from this cohort will get 80% of their retirement income from the state pension with another 20% coming from their DC pensions.

Keeping the per kWh caps and abolishing the fixed payment is dumb policy if the goal is to help the poorest households with their energy bills as typically they will be living in smaller properties and not using as much energy anyway as they can't afford to.

An increase in the lifetime and/or annual pension allowances to try to encourage the over 50s to stay in the labour market. I would not be surprised if they introduce a lower age limit to the increased allowance(s) to prevent younger workers from benefiting from the change.

Question is how much (borrowed) money are these buyers showing up to the market with. At 4-6% interest rates presumably a lot less than when interest rates were 1-2%.

Yes, this is definitely one of those charts which will change a lot if you change the base year.

The thing about these 20-30% nominal HPC predictions is that I would guess the drops will not be distributed evenly geographically. Places like Hull or Stoke-on-Trent probably don't have quite so far to fall but England south of the Severn-Wash line (population: 30 million) could drop 50% and still be expensive relative to local wages.

I'm English and have been living in Scotland for the last 15 months, in that time I've never once heard anybody say anything against the English. However most times when my English acquaintances (including family) heard we were moving up here, out come the anti-Scotland "jokes" and diatribes...

Scots get more free childcare than English people do, 30 hours per week for all 3 and 4 year olds.

The people who watch evening TV news are way past the childbearing phase of life.

The people predicting mortgage rates will fall back down to 2-3% might want to have a think about why a commercial bank would lend at 2-3% to some random private citizen who may or may not pay them back when they can lend at 4% to the Bank of England which has a printing press with which to repay lenders. The interest rate that private citizen needs to pay a lender to be competitive with the BoE is now 4% plus a risk premium.

Fed funds rate is now in the range 4.50%-4.75%, after 15 years of ZIRP that looks pretty respectable to me. Bank of England base rate is only 3.50%, plenty of catching up to the Fed to do. If the BoE goes for a 0.5% hike that would at least give them a 4 handle for respectability. If they do it in two successive 0.25% hikes so they can give the impression of being careful navigators of choppy economic waters that's fine by me, no skin off my nose.