President-elect Donald Trump has a soft spot for Britain, according to former minister Michael Gove.
Britain has a soft spot for Mr Gove and, as the old joke has it, it’s the quicksand on the edge of Dartmoor.
Gove, who has a lucrative sideline as a journalist for the Times, interviewed Trump recently and reports that the Donald is keen to secure a quick trade deal with the UK after it leaves the European Union.
Let’s hope he is not just taking the Michael, when he says that.
“His mum comes from Scotland and he has a soft spot for Scotland particularly, but Britain generally,” Gove said in an interview on ITV’s Good Morning Britain breakfast show.
Trump famously has golf courses in Scotland. In 2015, they lost £9mln, which meant they contributed zero to Her Majesty’s Treasury. They also lost money in the preceding three years.
He also clashed with protesters over the development of the golf courses, but according to Gove, he appears not to hold a grudge.
Not only that, he is probably used to people taking a dislike to him.
The same might – or might not – be said of the bosses who feature in charity organisation Oxfam’s list of the eight men who, collectively, own as much as do half the world’s population – the poorer half, of course (about 3.6bn people).
Oxfam’s analysis of the super-rich includes all those individuals with a net worth of at least US$1bn.
“The 1,810 dollar billionaires on the 2016 Forbes list, 89% of whom are men, own US$6.5 trillion – as much wealth as the bottom 70% of humanity,” Oxfam’s report.
“While some billionaires owe their fortunes predominantly to hard work and talent, Oxfam’s analysis of this group finds that one-third of the world’s billionaire wealth is derived from inherited wealth, while 43% can be linked to cronyism,” it claimed.
All of which reminds me (a) of Donald Trump’s claim that he got his start in business with a “small” million dollar loan from his father; and (b) an old joke: “When I arrived in this town, all I had was a sack on my back, and now I am a millionaire? What did I have in the sack? Ten million dollars.”
Despite the efforts of some massively wealthy individuals, such as Bill Gates, to give much of their wealth away to charity (or in other cases, to ex-wives), it seems that the super-rich just can’t help becoming richer.
“Paying as little tax as possible is a key strategy for many of the super-rich,” the charity claimed.
Talking of paying as little tax as possible, it is time to look at the Trending section of a well-known search engine, and express surprise at how the deeply unsexy world of asset management appears to be dominating it today.
Alliance Trust PLC (LON:ATST), which is to stable management what Aston Villa FC is to … er … stable management, has set out a “new approach” to investment management.
Does it involve making money?
Well, yes, of course, but the crux of the new approach is handing over responsibility for investment management to Willis Towers Watson (WTW), working with eight equity managers, each of whom is rated best-in-class by WTW.
Each manager will typically select 20 stocks, with the idea being that restricting each manager to no more than 20 will result in them selecting la crème de la crème.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, the wrong politician could get elected as president of the most powerful nation in the world, for a start.
Sector peer Ashmore group PLC (LON:ASHM), which focuses on emerging markets, had a grumble in its trading statement about Donald Trump’s election prompting an outflow of funds from the group.
The renewed strength of the dollar also hit performance, but nonetheless the shares rose around 4% this morning.