A bonding experience

Tim Bond, BarCap's head of asset allocation, is a fairly balanced chap and is paid to take a considered view of most things, balancing out competing forces at work in the global economy, teasing out how they will impact actual investment policy.

But every once in a while he will let slip about what animates him and retirement annuities is clearly one of those ‘hot button’ topics. Chatting to him about the prospects for growth in the UK and the difficulties of building a sensibly diversified portfolio, Tim suddenly lunged into an attack on the  mandatory rules that force the vast majority of pensioners to  buy an annuity– “it is scandalous that you still have to convert to fixed income. I mean, that really is a scandal and it should be abolished because it is utterly random how [the effect of yield levels on gilts will ] fall on ...