Transcript: Understanding economics — why it matters for your money

This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘Understanding economics — why it matters for your money’

Claer Barrett
Hello. It’s Claer. This week, Money Clinic is on tour. Me and the team are currently on a train heading down to Bristol to record an episode with a live audience at the Bristol Festival of Economics tonight. And we’ll be taking live questions from the audience. So wherever you’re listening from, sit back and enjoy the journey and hopefully our final destination will be greater understanding of the economy and why it matters so much for our money.

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Welcome to Money Clinic, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times about personal finance and investing. I’m Claer Barrett, the FT’s consumer editor. And this week we’re coming to you live from the Great Hall of Bristol Grammar School as part of the Bristol Festival of Economics! (crowd cheers) Wow, that’s a real welcome. Thank you very much. Now, tonight, we’re gonna focus on how economics affects our everyday financial lives. Now, thank you to everybody who’s already submitted a question for our expert panel. I’ve got those. And we’re hoping to squeeze in some more from the floor as the evening goes on. Now, first, the people who I’ve chosen to help answer your questions about money, economics, life, the universe and everything are firstly, Sarah O’Connor, the FT columnist, and Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at the investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown. (crowd cheers)

Susannah Streeter
Great to be here, Claer.

Claer Barrett
Well, Susannah, I was accosting people on the way in and asking them what they might want to ask the panel later. And one of the first people I picked on said ‘Susannah Streeter is my daughter!’ (laughter) So your mom and your dad are in the audience. Can we have a big cheer for Mr and Mrs Streeter! (crowd cheers)

Susannah Streeter
Well, they’re not far away. Yes, of course. I grew up near Bristol, and certainly I’ve lived actually in the city for nearly three decades now. So obviously whenever I come here, they support me.

Claer Barrett
Well, what are the big financial stories in Bristol right now?

Susannah Streeter
Well, I think like many cities, of course, the cost of living crisis is weighing down very, very heavily on certain sections of the population, particularly the poorest, because, of course, they spend the most money on the essentials where we’ve seen those high price rises. But also housing is a real issue in this city. Just this month, we’ve had a huge tower block evacuated because of structural difficulties, we’ve got a real shortage of housing across the city. Our university students are being shipped out to Wales, to a campus there because there isn’t enough accommodation.

Claer Barrett
To Wales?

Susannah Streeter
Yes, absolutely. Over the bridge.

Claer Barrett
Wow.

Susannah Streeter
Simply it’s so expensive.

Claer Barrett
Well, thank you Susannah. Now. Sarah O’Connor, you’re associate editor and a columnist at the FT. Now, tell the audience some of the things that you like writing about for the FT because often — you are a young person, yourself — but often the issues that you write about really affect young people. We’ve got lots of young faces in the audience tonight.

Sarah O’Connor
That’s very nice of you to describe me as a young person. I think that’s because I was when I first joined the FT in 2007, I’m not sure I still am at the age of 39, but thank you for saying so. So, yes. So I write about economics. I also write quite a lot about jobs, the world of work and how it is changing and how technology is beginning to change the way that we work and how much we’re going to work in the future. And I’m actually on book leave from the FT at the minute, which is six months of time away from work to try and write a book, which is really exciting. And I keep telling people it’s like being on maternity leave but without a baby to look after. It’s absolutely amazing. I love it.

Claer Barrett
Can you tell us any more about your book?

Sarah O’Connor
Yeah, So it’s about it’s about work and technology. My working title is ‘Human Robots’. So it’s exploring both the kind of dystopian and hopefully more utopian possibilities about what’s coming towards us.

Claer Barrett
OK, so we’re gonna be quizzing you about AI later. So I’d like to start off our discussion tonight with the help of you, the audience. Now, there was a story in the Financial Times that the government wants to strengthen financial education in primary and secondary schools and further education, which is something that the FT’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign has been lobbying for for a long time. Because, frankly, what we’re taught in school about money, you could probably write on the back of a postage stamp. So I am gonna ask for a show of hands. Put your hand up if you wished that you had learned more about money in school. Excellent. OK. There’s a forest of hands. That’s all stars for ten. Sarah, what would you have liked to have learned about money in school? In fact, did you learn anything about money in school?

Sarah O’Connor
Literally on our last day of school. So my school finished age 16, and a lot of us weren’t going on to sixth form college. A lot of us were gonna begin our kind of adult working lives at that point. Our teacher, our form teacher obviously had a certain thought that he hadn’t taught us anything about how to navigate the real world. So he said, before you go, just one piece of advice. If you ever have to pay someone some money with a cheque and you don’t actually have any money in your bank account, just put the wrong date on it, it’ll buy you a little bit of time. (laughter) That was literally the one bit of sort of financial education that I got at school. And so I . . . 

Claer Barrett
What would you have liked to have learned about other than forging cheques . . . 

Sarah O’Connor
Other than forging cheques, it would have been great to learn something about pensions and why they’re important so that, you know, when I did have the opportunity to pay into a pension at the FT, I knew that it was, it actually made sense to kind of pay in as much as I possibly could to get the matching contributions from my employer.

Claer Barrett
Susannah, how about you? Did you learn anything about money in school? And if you didn’t, what would you have liked to learn . . . 

Susannah Streeter
I learned about money in school, really through working from the age of 14, first as a washer up, and then as a waitress, then as a, behind the bar. And that really taught me the value, actually, of money and just how much you need to work to have that money in your pocket. So I think that was most instructive.

Claer Barrett
Well, we’re gonna hopefully be teaching you lots more useful lessons about money and economics as the night goes on. But it’s not just about learning things we need to know to make us money. It’s about learning about things that can protect us from losing money. And I think at the moment, with the economic backdrop to our talk tonight, that is very important. Because arguably the biggest story of the year, Sarah, has been the Bank of England cranking up the pressure on our household balance sheets by raising interest rates to try to tame inflation. Now the medicine appears to be working. We’ve seen a big drop in inflation this week. But how are you reading the market conditions at the moment? Are we gonna see the cost of living crisis hopefully easing up a bit next year?

Sarah O’Connor
Yeah, hopefully. But I think it’s important to remember that you can’t kind of undo what’s just happened. So even though, you know, the rate of inflation has come down, that still means that prices are rising at a pace of 4.6 per cent. And it’s helpful sometimes, I think, to look at the level of prices rather than just the rate at which they’re changing. So I actually wrote down some numbers from a very good FT story that was published by our colleagues. So food prices are 30 per cent higher now than they were in January 2021. The price of sugar, baked beans, tinned tomatoes are all 50 per cent higher. And we’re not expecting deflation, so they’re never gonna come back down again. These are kind of huge changes in levels. A litre of olive oil, it costs £3.50 two years ago. It now costs £7.16. So, you know, and that’s before you even start to think about what’s happened to rents and other things that are a huge part of your incomes. And although now you’ve got inflation at 4.6 and wage growth is a bit higher, so it starts to feel as if, OK, people are starting to make some kind of real terms gains. If you look over the past two years, wages have not risen by as much as prices have. So we’re all kind of collectively poorer than we were two years ago. And I think the legacy of that is gonna take quite a long time to unwind.

Claer Barrett
Now, Susannah, you interviewed Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist. Now, how did that go? And give us your take on the outlook for next year.

Susannah Streeter
So, yes, he came to Hargreaves Lansdown, was meeting business leaders as well from across the city, really trying to gauge the impacts of interest rates on their businesses as well, of course, the financial resilience of individuals as well. Now, he also made a speech at the Bristol Festival of Economics . . . 

Claer Barrett
Woohhh!

Susannah Streeter
And we are here now. And really, he did stress that although we have seen that inflation is coming down, we are still seeing those price rises, albeit at a slower rate. The problem is that we’re getting persistent wage growth. And so, for example, private wages going up by 7.7 per cent in the year to October. And that is what the bank is worried about, that feeding through to services inflation. And so that is why we are getting these messages now from the Bank of England that rates are gonna have to stay at a persistently high level for a, definitely a number of months. And we are getting other data through. And insolvencies, for example, reaching rates not seen since 2008 in the financial crisis. So because of that, the likelihood is I think that we will see these rates 5.25 per cent stay for, you know, a considerable period of time, although we should get cuts if we don’t get any more shocks to the economy, second half of next year.

Claer Barrett
Well certainly that’s . . . 

Susannah Streeter
Or at least the start of the cuts.

Claer Barrett
Certainly that’s what the mortgage market is pricing in if you’re somebody who’s looking to refinance your home loan. Sarah, is there a risk that the Bank of England has overdone it?

Sarah O’Connor
Yes. I mean, it’s a really difficult job for the bank because you’re kind of, it’s like you’re steering like a tanker or something and you turn it and then you have to wait quite a long time for it actually to turn. So, you know, that was always the case. But it’s become more difficult because one of the kind of key ways that higher interest rates feed through to slowing down the economy is through people’s mortgage rates. But actually, many more people now than the last time we had a big kind of sharp increase in rates — which was in the 80s — many more people now own their homes outright. There’s been a lot of baby boomers who’ve retired. They’ve kind of banked big rises in prices. They own their homes, all right, so don’t have mortgages at all. And I think in every region of the country except London, that is the most common tenure is owner outright rather than people who are paying with a mortgage or people who are renting. So that’s a lot of people that actually the interest rates are not gonna be subject . . . 

Claer Barrett
Interest rates could be 15 per cent and they wouldn’t care.

Sarah O’Connor
Wouldn’t affect them as much. I mean, there are other ways that they feed through, but that’s normally the key one. And also, you know, a lot of us now, myself included, are on these fixed-rate deals, which means that it’s . . . when it happens to you that you have to refinance, then it’s a sudden sort of ‘ouch moment’. It’s coming to us in March. But that’s happening more gradually in a sort of staggered effect rather than something that affects the economy all at once. So it might be that we find out middle of next year, they massively overdid it and we’re kind of cratering into a recession. And unemployment is shooting up. So yeah it’s possible . . . 

Susannah Streeter
At the moment the bank’s prediction’s are that unemployment is going to rise but more gradually but certainly is going to be ramping up. And we’ve done research at Hargreaves Lansdown, our savings and resilience barometer, specifically looking at the effects of mortgages. And by July next year, it’s estimated that 3 in 5 mortgage holders will have to be paying more and almost a quarter are at risk of falling behind their payments. But what we are saying is that the banks are really kind of moving and trying to offer extended terms, for example, and being a bit more lenient, which is probably why we haven’t seen the price falls so far that were predicted earlier this year. But we do still think that there is a correction to come.

Claer Barrett
Now, Sarah, you’ve also been in Bristol all day today. You did another panel at the Bristol Festival of Economics talking about how the economy and younger people are interacting. Tell us a little about that.

Sarah O’Connor
Yes. So that panel was about Generation Alpha, who are apparently the children now, basically. So I have a little four-year-old Gen Alpha kid at home. And it was sort of looking at their prospects. What kind of world are we going to bequeath to them? And it won’t surprise you to learn that it was quite gloomy in many ways. You know, people were asking about the environment. They were asking about the impact of technology. There was some younger people in the audience who were saying that, you know, they feel really quite strongly that there’s like a huge amount of competition for good jobs. And, you know, they’re worried about that. And then obviously, there’s the question of new technology, artificial intelligence, robots. Is that gonna make it harder for us or easier? So, yeah, lots of lots of sort of fears and concerns. And I would say a little bit of a sense of hopelessness from some of the younger people that, you know, they’ve been through Covid recently. They’ve just kind of grown up during an era of austerity. And they’re, I wouldn’t say they were feeling massively optimistic, the ones in the audience anyway.

Susannah Streeter
It’s interesting, though, because if you then reflect on how your own career has progressed, we look quite a lot at female financial resilience through our campaign, Financially Fearless, and the gender investment gap, you know, is still very wide when it comes to pensions, when it comes to investments, mainly because women are still often the caregivers. However, you know, on the flip side of that, because of the hybrid working, the flexible working policies that have been put in since the pandemic, it has given women so many more opportunities. I simply couldn’t have done my job without that real flexibility in that working from home opportunity, which has enabled me to have a full-time job and have three children and get up every morning pretty much at the crack of dawn, survey the financial markets and still often get them to school in time, although that is sometimes slightly problematic. (laughter) But yeah, but certainly had that flexibility not been around, I certainly wouldn’t be able to have done my job. And so for many people actually, we’ve got a lot more opportunity and that is actually quite reassuring for women when childcare costs us . . . 

Claer Barrett
The pandemic has forced that change to happen faster than it would have done naturally. Now, I mean, the changes coming from AI, artificial intelligence, as you said, a worry very much for young people, a worry for slightly older people. I mean, could a robot replace me in the future? Like . . . 

Sarah O’Connor
No Claer, never.

Claer Barrett
I hope not. Susannah, AI is also something that fascinates investors. Tell us a bit more about that.

Susannah Streeter
Yes, certainly. I mean, what we’ve seen as far as the S&P 500, Wall Street, that’s really surged again this year, really fuelled by this AI frenzy. So you’ve got the Magnificent Seven, those Big Tech giants. It’s the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and Alphabet. So they have such weight on the indices. And so the Nasdaq and the S&P 500. So when, of course, you invest in a tracker fund, you’re putting a lot of money into just a handful of stocks, which is kind of risky in itself. But a lot of people want to know, where should I invest if I want to make the most of the AI revolution? And the losses have gone into Wall Street. But some really interesting research has come out recently looking at which countries might really benefit from the AI revolution and actually throws out results you might not necessarily expect. I mean . . . 

Claer Barrett
Should we ask the audience? Shout out, what countries do you think will benefit from the AI . . . 

Susannah Streeter
Number one . . . 

Claer Barrett
Revolution . . . 

Susannah Streeter
Which country around the world do you think will reap the most rewards and be the biggest beneficiary?

Claer Barrett
Is anyone brave enough to have a guess? Lots of . . . 

Susannah Streeter
China?

Claer Barrett
People saying China is . . . 

Susannah Streeter
We’re gonna put that in the back pocket. It’s actually the United States, partly because of the dominance of tech firms. Actually, it’s not necessarily just about the innovation of AI, but it’s actually also about how well the technology can be diffused and then adapted across economies. And so here in the UK, because of the higher education sector in particular, are bringing some of the best talent from different countries around the world. And also the adaptability of firms to really take on new technological developments very quickly because it’s quite advanced — that’s one of the reasons why the UK is expected to be one of the big beneficiaries. Now, you mentioned China. My dad mentioned China there in the audience.

Claer Barrett
I hope you didn’t plot the answer.

Susannah Streeter
China’s actually come in at number 18, which is quite surprising in this forecast. And this is because even though we know that China has spent an awful lot of money and research in trying to advance its AI ambitions, because of the chip wars that we have raging between the US and China right now, but also because of, you know, track record in China clamping down on the tech sector — it’s expected that it’s gonna take longer for really AI to take hold within the economy. And what will probably happen is there’d be two spheres of influence, one led by the US, one led by China around the world as so you may get fresh kind of geopolitical fracture because of that.

Claer Barrett
Now we’re gonna turn now. Sorry. Have you got your microphone? Fantastic. Wonderful, actually. Can we have a quick round of applause for Zoe, who’s organised everything for us tonight? (crowd cheers) Now, our first question tonight is coming from a young man called Jay, who I buttonholed when he came in because he’s age 16. And I think he might be, unless anyone wants to claim otherwise, one of the youngest people in the audience. Jay, tell us your question, please.

Jay
Hi, I’m Jay. I’m 16 and interested in learning about the stock market. How would you suggest someone my age could dip into trading?

Claer Barrett
Susannah, would you like to answer that?

Susannah Streeter
So it’s great that you’re really interested already, because obviously the sooner you start, the greater the prospects are for higher returns over time, because actually we should look at it as a long term plan because we know that the stock market can be volatile. But if you look over the longer term and have a longer horizon, you have greater prospects of higher returns. So if you’re 16, I’d say the best way of getting stock in would be certainly seeing a parent or guardian can open a junior Isa for you and then you could work with them to try and find out the best ways of investing. And the first rule really is don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I suppose I kind of like to use the analogy of cake for most things . . . 

Claer Barrett
Cake!

Susannah Streeter
You know, there’s different things, asset classes like funds and shares. Let’s take those two, for example. So if you think about a fund, well, think about a really big gateau with lots of layers in it. Essentially, if you buy a bit of a fund, you’re buying a slice of that gateau. And in that slice, you’ve got investments in lots of different companies. And then if you buy slices of lots of different funds, you’re perhaps buying slices of different geographies and different sectors of the market. And that is absolutely crucial. But then you’re spreading your risks because you’ve got all of those layers you’re investing in.

Now, shares, on the other hand, almost like those fairy cakes with lots of icing on top that you could buy at the fringes of those investments. Because if you just make up your portfolio with a number of shares, you’re putting a lot of risk in just a few companies. And what you really want to do is spread your risks. And, you know, we talked about financial education. There is a huge amount of information out there on regulated financial sites. A lot of younger people are getting financial advice from social media. And the problem is that isn’t regulated. They don’t have to go through all of the hoops that we do in regulated firms to make sure that you’re really balancing the risk and really make it clear to people what those risks are for any individual investment.

Claer Barrett
So keep learning, keep reading. And thank you very much, Jay, for starting us off with a fantastic question tonight. Now, we had another question, I think, from over this side of the room. Somebody called out earlier about student debt. Would the person who said that like to put it in the form of a question to the panel perhaps? Ah, you’re a very good sport.

Unidentified speaker
I don’t think I really understood how your student debt interest rate could vary over time and how it would be affected by inflation. I’m not sure if I’m right, but I kind of assumed that your student debt interest rate was kind of, was fixed over the rest, over the 20 years.

Claer Barrett
And are you someone who’s finished university now? Are you still studying?

Unidentified speaker
No, I’m still at uni.

Claer Barrett
And here in Bristol?

Unidentified speaker
Yeah.

Claer Barrett
Living in Newport?

Unidentified speaker
Thankfully not.

Claer Barrett
OK. All right.

Susannah Streeter
Newport’s very nice too but it’s not what you chose.

Claer Barrett
Maybe a bit of a long commute. Now, Sarah, you’ve written lots about student debt in the FT over the years. And it keeps changing, of course, the system keeps changing. There are lots of retrospective changes. Lots of people don’t realise that the interest rate is being applied from the day you start studying. That was a big shocker for me when I went to university.

Sarah O’Connor
So yeah, so it will, the interest will change over time depending on inflation. So right now it looks appalling and hopefully it will start to look better. But the bright side is that it doesn’t operate like a normal loan. Like if you’re struggling, if you’ve not got a job . . . 

Claer Barrett
If you have a baby.

Sarah O’Connor
If you have a baby, you need to take time out, it’s not gonna be something that is causing you problems. But when you are earning over the threshold, it does become basically like a 7 per cent tax.

Claer Barrett
An extra tax. But the bit of hope that I want to give you is there’s a huge body of economic data that shows that people who go to university and get a degree do earn more over the course of their working lives and careers, and they earn more even with that extra rate of graduate tax being clawed back from them through the student loan.

Do we have any other people in the room who would like to ask the panel a question? If you do, then please raise your hand. OK. We’ve got, we’ve got lots of questions. Go for the lady on the aisle, then we’ll come to you in the gilet.

Unidentified speaker 2
Actually, this is a question about housing. So you were just all talking about your mortgages. And all I was thinking is that we are encouraged to own our homes still in Britain. It’s a big thing. And I rent. I can’t even, I wouldn’t even begin to think about owning because I’m freelance. So forget it. You know, they just, they won’t even look at me. But in Europe, renting is quite a big thing. Is it so bad to rent?

Sarah O’Connor
I do think that our kind of obsession in the UK with home ownership and with getting more people on the housing ladder is partly because we allow renting to be such an unpleasant experience. But actually we could fix that bit and then we wouldn’t have to be so obsessed with home ownership.

Susannah Streeter
It is a problem, though, with the very fact that we just don’t have enough houses to rent and obviously with no-fault evictions, this is aimed at ensuring people can stay in those homes for longer. But ultimately, you do need to have many more homes constructed to be able to be rented out. And certainly some of the changes that are being brought in are pushing more landlords out of the the buy-to-let sector because they can’t offset their tax so efficiently, high mortgage rates and shortage ultimately. So there are some structural issues why renting still certainly isn’t the favourable option given that rents are even higher than mortgage payments, despite the fact that they’ve also gone up so dramatically.

Claer Barrett
Yeah. Nobody’s talking about giving help to renters. But a related question, so you said you’re a freelancer. So there’s an awful lot of discrimination, frankly, in the financial system against freelancers, people who don’t have a regular wage. But there’s more and more people who are working as freelancers or in the gig economy as a way of dressing it up. Tell us your thoughts about that.

Sarah O’Connor
Yes. So definitely in the UK, and in fact you mentioned entrepreneurship as well, I mean in the UK since the financial crisis, the last one in 2008, there’s been a huge increase in the proportion of people who are self-employed, and that ranges from people being Uber drivers or riding for Deliveroo to people setting up their own kind of independent, one-person consultancies. There’s been a real kind of mixture of people that have decided to become self-employed. But yeah, I feel like the other structures in our economy haven’t necessarily caught up with the fact this is becoming a much more common way of working. So yes, things like getting a mortgage are much, much harder than they need to be, probably. I think the yeah, a lot of our kind of financial institutions are still kind of wedded to the notion of most people having a sort of traditional 9-to-5 job. But actually the world of work hasn’t been like that for quite a long time.

Claer Barrett
Even things like direct debits, we’ve got the same amounts of money coming out for something every month. It would be wonderful if we could have some flexibility with that. Well, thank you very much for your question. And we had one more question from the man in the gilet.

Unidentified speaker 3
Thank you. A term that’s been used by the panel this evening and is in the press quite a lot at the moment, and you could argue is the downfall of Liz Truss, is stimulating growth. What is it in practical terms and why is it so important?

Claer Barrett
Great question. Why is growth so important? Who wants to go first?

Sarah O’Connor
I can.

Claer Barrett
Go.

Sarah O’Connor
So if the economy isn’t growing, then the pie isn’t growing, basically. I mean, Liz Truss talked about the pie. And it became very annoying and a weird mixed metaphor. But the the basic point holds, I think, that everything becomes a bit harder if things aren’t growing, we end up with these very difficult fights over how to divide it and who gets how much. Whereas in the kind of nice decade of the 90s, we had growth at like steady 2.5, 3 per cent a year. Wages were growing kind of steadily, but just slightly above inflation and everything just kind of becomes a bit easier.

You know, you can invest more, you can support your public services. And when the economy isn’t growing, all of that just becomes harder, particularly if the population is ageing. And so some of the kind of the things that you need to spend money on are becoming ever greater, it becomes difficult if you don’t have more kind of tax revenue coming in from the fact that there are growing companies that are making more money and more people working and that sort of thing.

That said, I think sometimes economic growth gets kind of fetishised and I think Liz Truss fell into this trap a bit. And I think it’s always worth remembering that like growth is a means to an end. It shouldn’t be an end in itself. Like we want to grow the economy in order to be able to live good, happy, healthy lives. Not, we’re not living our lives in service to simply like achieving a certain GDP number. And I think sometimes politicians in particular seem to get that a bit muddled.

Susannah Streeter
Yes. And there’s a difference between short-term growth, short-term stimulus and long-term growth. And if you cut taxes, you put more money into people’s pockets that they’ll spend more on. The UK economy’s very reliant on consumer spending, but that’s not necessarily a very healthy way to be for the longer term. To stimulate growth of the longer term, you really need to have rather more money go into the pockets of individuals, more money into longer-term investments that can provide that growth in decades to come and kind of provide the backbone for the economy. And I think that’s where the argument is really going to go next year when we go into the elections. How it’s best to stimulate that growth and what kind of growth do we want?

Claer Barrett
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’re nearly at time. It makes me say thank you very much to our panel, Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, Sarah O’Connor, associate editor at the FT. Thanks to Bristol Ideas for inviting us down to take part. Bristol Grammar School and its pupils. And to you all for being a fabulous audience! (crowd cheers and claps)

Now, that’s it for Money Clinic with me, Claer Barrett. And we hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this live episode. If you’d like us to extend our tour to your part of the world or have an idea for a future episode, then get in touch. Our email address is money@ft.com. You can also follow me on Instagram. I’m @claerb.

Money Clinic was produced by Persis Love and Tamara Kormornick. Sound design was by Breen Turner and our editor is Manuela Saragosa. You heard original tunes this week by Metaphor Music and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. And finally, our usual disclaimer. The Money Clinic podcast is a general discussion around financial topics and does not constitute an investment recommendation or individual financial advice. For that, you’ll need to find an independent financial adviser. That’s all the small print for now. We’ll see you back here next week. And thanks for having us, Bristol! (crowd cheers and claps).

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