The Contrarian Investor: A perfect storm

CONTRARIAN INVESTOR

For a country that prides itself on its cutting edge use of financial structures to fund infrastructure, the UK does not do a terrifically good job of actually building the stuff.

I think we can all agree we have a problem, made much worse by the current government’s short-sighted decision to cull big capex spending early on in the cutbacks. The good news is that, where the government is seen to be lagging behind, private investors are setting the pace. In the past few years we have seen two remarkable, parallel transformations. The first is that a huge quantity of money has flooded into the UK market from big foreign institutional investors – and, according to a report last week from Linklaters, there is more to come. This inflow has been matched by an insatia...