Jeremy Hunt’s package of reforms to financial services regulation has been trailed as a 21st Century ‘Big Bang’. For younger readers, the last one was in 1985, when both Thatcher’s UK and Reagan’s America effectively let the banks have free rein to lend, invest and run the financial markets. A boom or two followed and it took 15 years for the chickens to come home to roost when, in 2008, those uncontrolled banks started to go bust, everything crashed and governments suddenly realised they needed regulating after all. So here we go again, about to ‘unlock the potential of Brexit’, to bring on, they hope, another blood-rush of lending and investing which will, I fear, have the same, inevitable results. But, for this government, on someone else’s watch. Cynical? Moi? Sorry, but I really have seen it all before.
“Financial advice provides £47,000 wealth uplift in a decade”
After a meeting of financial advisers this week, a younger member of my team asked me if I thought there were actually too many financial advisers. ‘How can there be?’, was my first reaction, ’there were over 100,000 of us in the ‘90s, now there are only around 25,000.
