So, joy of joys, we’re not in a recession. Or have ‘narrowly avoided’ one, although ‘we’re not out of the woods yet’, according to Chancellor Safe-Hands-Hunt. Now in the not-always-so-good old days, recession pretty much always meant unemployment. For advisers, that meant clients cancelling savings, pensions, life insurance and mortgage endowment (remember them?) plans, having to pay back commission and perhaps going out of business themselves. Now that commission has gone, that’s much less of a worry. Most of the remaining population of advisers look after those that already have money and what happens in the UK economy has relatively little effect on their businesses. It’s global stock markets which worry us more. When they fall as they did last year, fewer people want to invest and those that are invested become far more cautious. But what that does mean is that, unless the way we do things changes, there will be far fewer people who ‘already have money’ for the next generation of advisers to advise.
“Rachel Reeves may be forced to raise taxes”
Why did she/they (in the old sense) think that tinkering around with IHT and CGT would be enough to sort out the NHS; and the potholes; and…and the list goes on. My guess is that they asked the Treasury for a list of anything not involving income tax that they could get away with lightly, although they should already have learned from the winter fuel stuff that all publicity is not good publicity.
