The Contrarian Investor: Eyes down for Election 2015

Eyes down for Election 2015

Although there is an election not far away, you might have blanked out all discussion of it because a) in your constituency it will not make much difference anyway who you vote for, and b) the actual colour of the next government depends upon a series of ifs and buts which makes predicting the result almost impossible.

Political website Electoral Calculus recently showed a brilliant chart which illustrated the likelihood of various minority governments, having increased the number of possible coalition-based permutations from six to a staggering 12.  At the moment, the best bet seems to be on a Lab/SNP coalition, but who knows? So among all this election chatter, what should the financial community be worrying about? The most obvious observation is there is not actually a huge divergence of opinion about what to do with business and investment policy.  On a rather more practical level, the retail...