Irregular Roundup, 27th July 2026

We begin today’s Irregular Roundup with Savvy Squirrel.

Savvy Squirrel

In MoneyWeek, Merryn Somerset Webb wasn’t impressed with Rachel Reeve’s choice of mascot for her new investing campaign (Take The Next Step).

They succumb easily to squirrel pox carried by grey squirrels, they aren’t as big or as good at finding food as grey squirrels; and when they do find food,they often fail to hang on to it. They lose anywhere up to 25% of the food they cache to either theft or forgetfulness.

There are some 47 different organisations trying to stop them disappearing from the UK altogether. But their numbers just keep falling. They are, effectively, Britain’s pandas. Imagine being a policymaker in the UK, and choosing this animal.

It’s true that squirrels save rather than invest, and that no amount of taxpayer money can seem to save them from extinction.

• It’s also true that people in the UK don’t invest enough.

My objections (alongside Merryn) would be:

1. Why do we need a cartoon animal in the first place? Are we trying to get eight-year-olds to invest?
2. Why not get rid of stamp duty on shares and CGT on GIAs? Or index the annual ISA limit? Or restore 30% income tax relief on VCTs?  Or scrap risk warnings that make investing in shares sound, well, risky?

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It turns out that a third of advisors think the campaign will fail, with 45% hopeful that it will succeed.

Research from Flagstone found that 47% of advisors think that the cost of living means that many people cannot afford to invest.

• 42% think that clients don’t trust financial markets
• And 39% think they lack an understanding of how investing works.

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Separately, the FT reported on a discussion of the interim findings of the second Pensions Commission at the Pensions Management Institute (PMI) annual conference:

Workers value more immediate workplace benefits including pay rises, free hot drinks and improved bathroom facilities over higher pension contributions.

Despite this, the panel predicted that the final report would recommend higher contribution rates.

Greenspan

Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100.

• He was chairman for most of my working life  – from 1987 to 2006, serving under four presidents and through a period of economic stability and low inflation that has become known as the “Great Moderation”.

Of course, some would argue that his policies led to the crash of 2007, but it was a bit more complicated than simply Fed policy (in particular, low interest rates after the dot com bust and 9-11).

• His willingness to intervene when markets ran into trouble became known as the “Greenspan Put” and likely contributed to extra risk-taking.

The Fed said:

During his 18 years as Chairman, he guided the Federal Reserve through periods of significant economic expansion as well as periods of considerable stress. Under his leadership, the Federal Reserve achieved a sustained era of price stability that supported economic growth and helped anchor the public’s confidence in the institution.

Woodford

That’s life (that’s life).
That’s what all the people say.
You’re riding high in April, shot down in May.

Neil Woodford is probably not humming along. 

• After years of praise and riches for executing a fairly straightforward strategy pretty well, he overreached and had it all taken away.
• He was fined £5.9M in 2025, and his investment firm was fined £40M.

The FCA seems to have it in for him now – they’ve asked for an injunction against his subscription website (W4.0 – I hadn’t even heard of this one).

• It is a trading name for W Four Point Zero FZE LLC, registered in the UAE.

The FCA said:

The FCA alleges that Mr Woodford and W4.0 are providing regulated investment advice and making financial promotions through the subscription-based platform, www.w4pz.com, without authorisation

Piketty

Thomas Piketty is back, and Noah Smith is not impressed.

• His old book (did you get through it?) was about inequality, and he saw (surprise, surprise) taxing rich people more as the way to fix that.

Now he’s back with another plan to fix the world.

• Climate change has taken over from inequality, and the way to fix things is not just “the energy transition”, we now need to add “sufficiency”, which is the World Inequality Lab’s name for de-growth.

This includes labour hour reductions , growth caps in rich countries, less material consumption, and changes in food habits.

Noah is not happy:

He envisions detailed central planning to achieve deliberate impoverishment of large portions of the world’s population— mandated reductions in the consumption of various specific goods, including food.

In addition to the dubious morality of deliberately impoverishing untold millions of human beings based on scientific models that have already been rejected, this kind of scheme is just utterly unworkable.

It gets better – Piketty wants a global fiscal authority that can run global taxation:

We envision a new institution, the Global Justice Fund to finance this sustainable convergence path. The fund would raise revenue via global wealth and income taxes to be used for climate investments, expansion of health and education, and building up a World Sovereign Fund. 

When I did my MBA back in the 1990s, my finance professor’s catch-phrase was “Are these guys on drugs”?

• Piketty takes me back to those days.

Noah focuses on the free rider problem:

Climate change is a global negative externality — the reason countries don’t all just impose their own local carbon taxes and solve the problem is that there’s an incentive to free ride and let other countries handle it. 

That exact same free rider problem applies to the global fiscal authority that Piketty envisions. There’s a clear incentive for any country to simply drop out of the fund and let other countries fix climate change for them.

But Piketty probably knows this. He’s just one of those guys who likes to shout about higher taxes every now and then, to feel good about themselves.

• It’s a bit like those self-flagellating pilgrims of old, except that nowadays the scourge is aimed at someone else’s back.

Accounts

This won’t mean much to those of you without a limited company, but HMRC are continuing down their path of removing perfectly good ways to submit financial records to the government in favour of fairly crappy private sector (ie. usually not free) alternatives. 

• First they got rid of the paper VAT submission
• Then they made landlords and the self-employed use MTD (Making Tax Digital) software
• Next they removed the corporation tax return software
• And now they have announced that from April 2028, commercial software will have to be used to submit accounts to Companies House

In addition, micro entities (companies with fewer than 10 employees, £0.5M of assets and £1M of turnover) will need to submit a profit and loss account as well as a balance sheet.

• At least they will be able to opt out of the P&L being made public.

It’s another blow to small companies from a government “committed to growth”.

Ten Years Gone

The tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote came and went.

• Brexit hasn’t been the success I hoped for, but that’s more because of the missed opportunities than the decision itself.

Lower government spending and slashing regulation were the way to go, but Covid and a series of poor Tory governments (implementing mostly non-Tory policies) put paid to that.

• And so ten years on, we come to Andy Burnham, record high taxes and Net Zero.

All you can say is at least it’s not Corbyn.

• But the next ten years don’t look like they will be any better.

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That’s it for today.

• Until next time.