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Andrew Craig
Verified account This account is verified. Learn more@andyroocraig
New book "Our Future is Biotech" available now:
ourfutureisbiotech.com
Best-selling author of "How to Own the World": amzn.to/2X6R4OR
ourfutureisbiotech.com
Best-selling author of "How to Own the World": amzn.to/2X6R4OR
1.2K Following 3.8K Followers 4.5K Posts
Latest posts 5
BRITAIN INVENTS IT. AMERICA OWNS IT.
Grand Theft Auto was created in Scotland. DeepMind was born in London. Arm's technology is in almost every smartphone on the planet.
Today, not one of these is a British stock-market listed company.
In my latest video I cover the final three of six policy decisions that have done enormous damage to our stock market - and to our economy by extension - over the last thirty years:
DECISION FOUR: We tax British people for owning British companies.
Buy shares in a main-listed British company and you pay 0.5% stamp duty. Buy shares in an American company and you don't. With UK shares yielding around 3.5%, that wipes out more than 14% of a whole year's dividend income on day one. Investors know this, so they pay less for British shares.
FIVE: A tax system that increasingly punishes investment and enterprise.
Companies are valued on a multiple of their post-tax profits. Raise a few billion in tax and you can destroy tens or even hundreds of billions of real wealth. It's also a big part of why so many entrepreneurs and wealthy people are leaving.
SIX: Regulation that strangled smaller companies - and a doom loop.
MiFID II, cost disclosure rules and the RDR have all pushed capital away from smaller companies and into bonds and US megacaps. Less money comes into UK shares, so valuations fall, so our best companies list in New York or get bought cheaply, so our market shrinks further. Round and round we go.
On a conservative measure, this has cost the UK more than £9 trillion. More than £200,000 for every working-age adult.
And that doesn't count the companies we never built - or sold for a fraction of what they became:
❇️ Solexa, the Cambridge company behind modern DNA sequencing - sold to Illumina for around $600m. Illumina is now worth around $40bn.
❇️ Cambridge Antibody Technology helped create Humira, which has generated around $240bn in sales for AbbVie - now worth around $500bn. CAT was sold for around £700m.
❇️ DeepMind - sold to Google for around £400m.
❇️ Arm - now worth more than a quarter of a trillion dollars - listed in New York, not London.
Meanwhile, the UK hasn't had a single biotech IPO, anywhere, for more than four years - despite having some of the best science in the world.
In the mid-1990s, our stock market was worth around a fifth of America's. Today it's about a twentieth.
None of this was inevitable.
The only good news here is that if policy caused this disaster, policy might just be able to fix it.
Link below. Please do share with anyone who thinks this is all just down to British companies being "worse" than American ones!
Very best, Andy.
youtu.be/Xm6of5EPM50
Grand Theft Auto was created in Scotland. DeepMind was born in London. Arm's technology is in almost every smartphone on the planet.
Today, not one of these is a British stock-market listed company.
In my latest video I cover the final three of six policy decisions that have done enormous damage to our stock market - and to our economy by extension - over the last thirty years:
DECISION FOUR: We tax British people for owning British companies.
Buy shares in a main-listed British company and you pay 0.5% stamp duty. Buy shares in an American company and you don't. With UK shares yielding around 3.5%, that wipes out more than 14% of a whole year's dividend income on day one. Investors know this, so they pay less for British shares.
FIVE: A tax system that increasingly punishes investment and enterprise.
Companies are valued on a multiple of their post-tax profits. Raise a few billion in tax and you can destroy tens or even hundreds of billions of real wealth. It's also a big part of why so many entrepreneurs and wealthy people are leaving.
SIX: Regulation that strangled smaller companies - and a doom loop.
MiFID II, cost disclosure rules and the RDR have all pushed capital away from smaller companies and into bonds and US megacaps. Less money comes into UK shares, so valuations fall, so our best companies list in New York or get bought cheaply, so our market shrinks further. Round and round we go.
On a conservative measure, this has cost the UK more than £9 trillion. More than £200,000 for every working-age adult.
And that doesn't count the companies we never built - or sold for a fraction of what they became:
❇️ Solexa, the Cambridge company behind modern DNA sequencing - sold to Illumina for around $600m. Illumina is now worth around $40bn.
❇️ Cambridge Antibody Technology helped create Humira, which has generated around $240bn in sales for AbbVie - now worth around $500bn. CAT was sold for around £700m.
❇️ DeepMind - sold to Google for around £400m.
❇️ Arm - now worth more than a quarter of a trillion dollars - listed in New York, not London.
Meanwhile, the UK hasn't had a single biotech IPO, anywhere, for more than four years - despite having some of the best science in the world.
In the mid-1990s, our stock market was worth around a fifth of America's. Today it's about a twentieth.
None of this was inevitable.
The only good news here is that if policy caused this disaster, policy might just be able to fix it.
Link below. Please do share with anyone who thinks this is all just down to British companies being "worse" than American ones!
Very best, Andy.
youtu.be/Xm6of5EPM50
www.youtube.com Britain Invents It. America Owns It. Here's Why. *Grand Theft Auto* was created in Dundee & Edinburgh. *DeepMind* wa... Dear @TheFCA . I completed a number of RegData submissions. You emailed 2 hours after that to say you don't have them. I tried to call to 100% confirm you have them but was then stuck on hold for an age and gave up. Is there an easy way I can 100% confirm you have my submissions please? They are "submitted" in RegData but this happened once before where they were submitted and you didn't accept that they were which was some kind of IT issue seemingly. Would be grateful for a response. Thanks.
HOW BRITAIN QUIETLY WRECKED ITS OWN ECONOMY
Thirty years ago, more than half of the money in British pension funds was invested in British companies. Today, it's more like four percent.
That collapse - and the policies that caused it - has cost this country many trillions of pounds.
Possibly even as much as £20 trillion.
In my latest video I cover the first three of six policy decisions that caused this slow motion car crash:
❇️ ONE: Gordon Brown's first Budget.
In July 1997, Brown abolished the dividend tax credit for pension funds. It raised around £5 billion a year for the Treasury - but was effectively a permanent tax on our pension funds owning British shares.
❇️ TWO: Rules that pushed our pension funds out of shares.
New accounting rules in the early 2000s put pension deficits on company balance sheets at market values every year. The Pensions Act of 2004 then effectively rewarded schemes for "de-risking" out of equities.
This ignores two centuries of evidence that the way you actually de-risk stock market investment is to hold shares for a long time.
So our pension funds sold British shares and bought gilts - eventually via something called LDI, which often involved borrowing to buy yet more gilts. We all remember how that ended in September 2022.
Ironically, those "safe" gilts have turned out to be anything but. Some long-dated gilts have lost more than half their value since 2020.
The result: according to the ONS, pension funds and insurers owned more than 45% of the UK stock market in 1997. By 2022, it was just over 4%.
❇️ THREE: A pension system that ignores Britain.
Auto-enrolment has brought millions into workplace pensions, which is a good thing. But an obsession with keeping costs down means so much of that money goes into the cheapest global passive trackers - where the UK makes up only around 3-4%. Less than Apple.
So every month, millions of British workers' pension contributions flow overwhelmingly into a handful of American mega-caps - and do very little to support the British economy we live and work in.
Pension funds around the world keep around 10% of their money in domestic shares on average. The US and Australia have around five to six times more in their own shares than we do - and much higher GDP per capita and bigger pension pots to show for it.
For a quarter of a century, the biggest pool of savings in the country has been a relentless SELLER of British companies. This is our money!
In my next video, I cover the other three decisions and highlight so many of the world-beating British companies we've lost along the way.
Full video in the comments below. Please do share with anyone you think might care - particularly anyone with a pension.
Very best,
Andy.
youtu.be/3oYsstx3aas
Thirty years ago, more than half of the money in British pension funds was invested in British companies. Today, it's more like four percent.
That collapse - and the policies that caused it - has cost this country many trillions of pounds.
Possibly even as much as £20 trillion.
In my latest video I cover the first three of six policy decisions that caused this slow motion car crash:
❇️ ONE: Gordon Brown's first Budget.
In July 1997, Brown abolished the dividend tax credit for pension funds. It raised around £5 billion a year for the Treasury - but was effectively a permanent tax on our pension funds owning British shares.
❇️ TWO: Rules that pushed our pension funds out of shares.
New accounting rules in the early 2000s put pension deficits on company balance sheets at market values every year. The Pensions Act of 2004 then effectively rewarded schemes for "de-risking" out of equities.
This ignores two centuries of evidence that the way you actually de-risk stock market investment is to hold shares for a long time.
So our pension funds sold British shares and bought gilts - eventually via something called LDI, which often involved borrowing to buy yet more gilts. We all remember how that ended in September 2022.
Ironically, those "safe" gilts have turned out to be anything but. Some long-dated gilts have lost more than half their value since 2020.
The result: according to the ONS, pension funds and insurers owned more than 45% of the UK stock market in 1997. By 2022, it was just over 4%.
❇️ THREE: A pension system that ignores Britain.
Auto-enrolment has brought millions into workplace pensions, which is a good thing. But an obsession with keeping costs down means so much of that money goes into the cheapest global passive trackers - where the UK makes up only around 3-4%. Less than Apple.
So every month, millions of British workers' pension contributions flow overwhelmingly into a handful of American mega-caps - and do very little to support the British economy we live and work in.
Pension funds around the world keep around 10% of their money in domestic shares on average. The US and Australia have around five to six times more in their own shares than we do - and much higher GDP per capita and bigger pension pots to show for it.
For a quarter of a century, the biggest pool of savings in the country has been a relentless SELLER of British companies. This is our money!
In my next video, I cover the other three decisions and highlight so many of the world-beating British companies we've lost along the way.
Full video in the comments below. Please do share with anyone you think might care - particularly anyone with a pension.
Very best,
Andy.
youtu.be/3oYsstx3aas
www.youtube.com How Britain Quietly Wrecked Its Own Economy *Thirty years ago, more than half the money in British pension fund... “THE RICH DON’T PAY ANY TAX”
With half of our billionaire wealth having left our shores, one of THE most annoying, ignorant and ludicrous things people keep repeating is the idea that the rich “don’t pay any tax”.
Truly - people can only say this if they have literally no understanding of the numbers or how tax works. It is simply not true.
In the UK, the top 1% of income taxpayers pay over a quarter of all income tax, whilst earning about 13% of the income. The top 10% pay around 60%.
Far more important is the contribution their activity makes to every other tax line. Masses. Across corporation tax, employer NI, income tax, VAT, business rates, green levies, fuel tax, and and and…
The UK's top 100 taxpayers actually paid c.£5.76 billion between them last year, up from £4.99 billion the year before. Here are the top 10:
1. Fred & Peter Done and family (Betfred) - £400.1m
2. Alex Gerko (XTX Markets) - £331.4m
3. Chris Rokos (hedge fund) - £330m
4. Stephen Rubin and family (Pentland / JD Sports) - £325.6m
5. Denise, John & Peter Coates (Bet365) - £227.1m
6. Peter Hargreaves (Hargreaves Lansdown) - £210m
7. Tom Morris and family (Home Bargains) - £209.1m
8. Sir Tim Martin (JD Wetherspoon) - £199.7m
9. Mike Ashley (Frasers Group) - £175.9m
10. Dame Mary & Douglas Perkins and family (Specsavers) - £121.7m
Further down the list FWIW are: JK Rowling (£47.5m), Harry Styles (£24.7m), Ed Sheeran (£19.9m) and Erling Haaland (£16.9m).
(These numbers come from publicly available sources, attributing corporation tax, income tax, dividend and capital gains tax and some duties from the latest company accounts to the people and families behind each business.)
Whatever people’s views on whether people should be very wealthy or not – which is a different debate – the simple fact is that the rich pay masses of tax – directly and indirectly.
…and in what other walk of life is it OK for the people who contribute very little or, in millions of cases actually nothing at all, to call out and have a go at the people who contribute masses? None that I can think of.
To say the rich don't pay tax is illogical, factually incorrect nonsense. Their contribution is enormous by definition if you actually understand how tax works in the round.
…and celebrating such people leaving the UK is a massively clear cut case of “Turkeys voting for Christmas”.
An awful lot of that going around in the UK nowadays sadly.
It is tragic.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
With half of our billionaire wealth having left our shores, one of THE most annoying, ignorant and ludicrous things people keep repeating is the idea that the rich “don’t pay any tax”.
Truly - people can only say this if they have literally no understanding of the numbers or how tax works. It is simply not true.
In the UK, the top 1% of income taxpayers pay over a quarter of all income tax, whilst earning about 13% of the income. The top 10% pay around 60%.
Far more important is the contribution their activity makes to every other tax line. Masses. Across corporation tax, employer NI, income tax, VAT, business rates, green levies, fuel tax, and and and…
The UK's top 100 taxpayers actually paid c.£5.76 billion between them last year, up from £4.99 billion the year before. Here are the top 10:
1. Fred & Peter Done and family (Betfred) - £400.1m
2. Alex Gerko (XTX Markets) - £331.4m
3. Chris Rokos (hedge fund) - £330m
4. Stephen Rubin and family (Pentland / JD Sports) - £325.6m
5. Denise, John & Peter Coates (Bet365) - £227.1m
6. Peter Hargreaves (Hargreaves Lansdown) - £210m
7. Tom Morris and family (Home Bargains) - £209.1m
8. Sir Tim Martin (JD Wetherspoon) - £199.7m
9. Mike Ashley (Frasers Group) - £175.9m
10. Dame Mary & Douglas Perkins and family (Specsavers) - £121.7m
Further down the list FWIW are: JK Rowling (£47.5m), Harry Styles (£24.7m), Ed Sheeran (£19.9m) and Erling Haaland (£16.9m).
(These numbers come from publicly available sources, attributing corporation tax, income tax, dividend and capital gains tax and some duties from the latest company accounts to the people and families behind each business.)
Whatever people’s views on whether people should be very wealthy or not – which is a different debate – the simple fact is that the rich pay masses of tax – directly and indirectly.
…and in what other walk of life is it OK for the people who contribute very little or, in millions of cases actually nothing at all, to call out and have a go at the people who contribute masses? None that I can think of.
To say the rich don't pay tax is illogical, factually incorrect nonsense. Their contribution is enormous by definition if you actually understand how tax works in the round.
…and celebrating such people leaving the UK is a massively clear cut case of “Turkeys voting for Christmas”.
An awful lot of that going around in the UK nowadays sadly.
It is tragic.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
www.bbc.co.uk Harry Styles and Anthony Joshua among UK's top tax payers The former One Direction member-turned-solo artist appears on the Sunday Times list for the first time.