GET OVER IT!
Top fund manager attacks hysteria of Bremoaners (including the FT) and compares it to Millennium bug panic
ONE of Britain’s leading fund managers yesterday branded warnings that Britain faces economic Armageddon because of Brexit ‘profoundly wrong’.
Speaking out against ‘ Brexitdriven hysteria’, Neil Woodford said ‘Remoaners’ who wanted to stay in the European Union should ‘get over themselves’.
The star stock-picker even used the interview with the Financial Times to accuse the newspaper – which opposes Brexit – of going ‘a little bit mad’ in its coverage of the referendum result and its aftermath.
Mr Woodford, 57, likened concerns about the UK economy to those over the millennium computer bug, which turned out to be nonsense.
The fund manager, who looks after about £15 billion of savers’ money, said the shares of certain British companies were now cheap because of overblown worries about Brexit.
‘ I’ve rarely witnessed such an overwhelming consensus view – which I believe to be profoundly wrong – that the UK economy is going to hell in a handcart,’ he told the Financial Times.
‘And I think your own paper has gone a little bit mad, actually. People have become so extreme in their view that Brexit is a pre-determined disaster for the UK economy, that the share prices are discounting literally economic Armageddon for the UK economy.’
Asked how he voted in the referendum, Mr Woodford said: ‘ Put it this way, I think I would have been a happier, less stressed fund manager if we’d voted to stay.
‘But we didn’t. And as a country, we just need to get over it. And the Remoaners need to get over themselves.’
Mr Woodford has earned a reputation for correctly predicting how companies will perform and investing savers’ cash accordingly, although he admits to having just had a ‘ pretty poor 18 months’. He said he feared global stock markets were in a bubble that will eventually burst.
But he added that he believed stock in certain UK companies was now at a knock- down price due to overblown worries about Brexit.
Mr Woodford said the share price of Lloyds Bank, which slumped immediately after the Brexit vote, was one example. He added: ‘ It is a big liquid UK- focused bank whose fortunes pivot on the relative health, or the absolute health, of the UK economy.
‘ What the share price is expressing is a consensual view that the UK economy is going to hell in a handcart. Definitely, absolutely, without doubt.’
Comparing Brexit fears to those surrounding the millennium bug, he added: ‘ Exactly the same thing will happen with respect to Brexit, whether we are able to negotiate a deal or not.
‘I’m not saying that it won’t be disruptive. But this notion of a cliff-edge event for the UK economy, where unemployment rises massively, consumer and business confidence evaporates and companies desert the UK is just not how the real world works.’ Mr Woodford’s comments will add weight to the views of other experts who believe official economic forecasts are too gloomy.
Leading Brexiteer, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, said last week that ‘Britain’s greatest days lie before it and not behind it’.
‘People have become so extreme’
IN a chilling warning to spend- spendspend politicians, senior Bank of England official Richard Sharp says Britain could collapse like Venezuela if the state borrows any more. There are no prizes for guessing where he sees the greatest threat.
Step forward Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow chancellor John McDonnell, the economically clueless Marxists who hailed Venezuela as a model for the UK – before the oil-rich country was driven bankrupt by Socialism, its people left hungry and deprived even of basic medicines.
Yet still the Labour duo prescribe massive extra spending as the cure for all ills, in a Britain already £1.8trillion in debt.
This is the same Mr Corbyn who this week declared war on Britain’s vital financial sector, the mainstay of our economy, which employs three million people and paid a record £70billion in tax last year.
Answering an American bank’s statement of the obvious – that a hard-Left government would pose a far greater economic threat than Brexit – he declared: ‘When they say we’re a threat, they are right.’
Who would be daft enough to put such a deluded booby in No 10 – and hand the nation’s chequebook to Mr McDonnell? CONGRATULATIONS to the Financial Times for publishing in full an interview with Neil Woodford, in which the fund manager accuses the paper of going ‘a little bit mad’ in its anti-Brexit hysteria.
Telling Remoaners to ‘get over themselves’, Mr Woodford says warnings of economic Armageddon are ‘ profoundly wrong’, adding: ‘This notion of a cliff-edge event … is just not how the real world works.’
Will the Japanese-owned FT now heed the wisdom it so honestly printed? Or will its madness continue?