Agree with most of your post Rob.

There are now even more meetings: what used to be a telephone call or a walk round to speak to someone at their desk to thrash out a solution, is now a scheduled meeting on Teams or whatever with other gobshites involved. Even WFH means more telephoning and the inevitable small talk soaking up time. FFS I even get messages asking if it's OK to phone me, WTF.

Until there is a heavy recession & folk are forced back into the office, productivity will certainly not improve.
However, that might take a generation in itself, as folk are now less accustomed to working in a vibrant atmosphere. On top of that is a seeming desire to move the country to a 4-day working week... lol

For decades, GDP growth's been driven by immigration... Whatever the politics, it's there in the numbers – people are willing to work more for less; in some cases (Punjabis, Chinese..) they build more businesses, are more likely to own property, more focused on education, etc. – it's why we bring so many in...

Without that, what is the UK? A financial hub with a bit of natural resources. And ofc, you keep importing people, it's not really a country or culture anymore – it's an airport lounge. And at some point, the brightest and best aren't going to want to come to Peckham or Northampton – they're going to go to Dubai, Singapore, Chongqing.. with modern infrastructure: clean; habitable.

It's been said that people land in Heathrow or LAX (US), get in a taxi and drive over potholes. Weak investment in infrastructure seems to set the stage for general decay. One reason I invest 20-30% in infrastructure is because we need a lot more of it – whether that happens... But the next phase of productivity growth will be AI and automation – which is a revolution happening right now, that only about 5% of people are aware of – and it will be deflationary (this is Cathy Woods' view). And we'll be able to keep printing money and there'll be a lot of growth supporting that. And we get the 1% everything economy. Returns on all investments become cash-like – but markets can climb a lot to get there.

And correspondingly Trump's.

…..and sensational i would say. Was the same during the pandemic… conspiracies and all that.

But… why the hell do we need yet another thread regarding gilts? This is just attention seekingfrom the OP (“ooo look at my succesful thread” etc).
We have more than enough threads on gilts/bonds already and this is so annoying.

As someone who holds a hell of a lot ‘fixed income’ in his portfolio, I obviously have views that I would like to share but I have not got the time to post them views on a handful of different threads.

As we've seen recently when the wheels do come off the correction can be painfully short and sharp.