For many months the complaint has been that the UK stock market is unfairly unloved.
Our finest firms are surely worth more than the deep discounts at which they trade compared with US rivals, goes the complaint.
Fund managers with a UK focus — notably Ashmore and Liontrust just last week — were feeling the pain, as were their long-suffering investors. And the dearth of fresh stock market London listings would continue until this anomaly was corrected.
The complaint was real, and a genuine concern. Though the obvious answer to the CEO moaning his shares were cheap was a simple one: buy some then.
One sort-of solution to the predicament arrived this morning, with a £470 million offer from US private equity house Searchlight for fund group Gresham House. Searchlight thinks Gresham is cheap at that price and is probably right.
Which indicates the problem here isn’t that foreign investors find London uninvestable, are scared by memories of Liz Truss and fears of what Brexit has done to us all. It is that UK investors are the scaredy-cats, the ones lacking the gumption to see the value before their very eyes.
If the London market really is undervalued — it looks it by any number of metrics — some people are going to make a bomb by buying it cheap. It would be nice if that were our pension funds. Rather than far-sighted foreigners.
The Government is doing what it can here in fairness. Some risk-taking from within the Square Mile shouldn’t need a Government incentive though.
That is what it is supposed to be good at all by itself.
