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.
“Is the AI hype machine losing steam?”
Many of the reviving rises in stock markets, particular in the US in the last year or so have been driven by AI. Not those buy-and-sell computerised algorithms we’ve heard so much about for years now; but the share prices of the big tech companies ‘at the heart of the AI revolution’.
