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.
“Letter of authority: Why now is the right time for change”
This may sound like a non-issue from outside the world-of-financial-advice bubble. It is the bain, however, of the daily working lives of many of us, particularly of those paid by we advisers to do the dirty work of dealing with the many providers with whom we have to work.
