What does it mean when the UKs top Bond Trader leaves?

Paying some attention to. Um, and I think it's important to sort of understand or discuss that particular story. Um, not just the fact that he paid three hundred and thirty million pounds worth of, uh, tax last year, and that's essentially the equivalent of the tax paid by the city of Doncaster, every single taxpayer in Doncaster. Um, not just the fact that it takes fifty thousand plus, uh, people to just cover the three hundred and thirty million, and that if you have fifty thousand people covering that cost, they come with a lot of expenses as well, which basically means that it's not covering the cost. It's only essentially fifty thousand people covering their own costs, um, or not even doing that. All of that's really important to know, and it's really important to know that, uh, these sorts of things are deeply impactful. Um, it's like top, top, top customers leaving a business. Um, if your top customers are leaving your business, there's the initial hit, but it's also indicative that something is wrong. If Chris Rokos was a property developer, you might say, "Oh, I wonder what he's seen in the property market." Um, or if he was a software technology guy, you might say, "Oh, I wonder what he's seen in the software technology market." Chris Rokos is a bond trader. He's a government bond trader. He deals in the business of sovereign debt. So his entire career, his billions, have been made by predicting what the government's gonna do. Um, he has become a billionaire by massively outperforming his predictions on what governments intend to do, what policies will work, what won't work. And what he likes to do is try and find, uh, examples, uh, of, um, essentially where people haven't predicted enough volatility into the, into the bond market, and then he trades off of that volatility, and he makes his money through bond trading. So he's, he's an expert. He's the supreme expert. He's one of the top, top, top, top, top experts in the world on understanding government policy and how it impacts the bond market. And he's leaving the UK. Now, why-- what does that say? What is that, right? So one of the things that it really does say is that he sees no end in sight for the destruction of the UK economy. Um, that being part of the UK economy as a billionaire is gonna be a bad thing for him. So what he's basically saying with his move is he's saying the economy will get worse because of the way the government's running it, and that they will probably be forced to, based on their current trajectory, uh, to put in wealth taxes, to put in exit taxes, and he needs to get out ahead of that, right? So he's trying to essentially say, "Look, they haven't ruled out wealth taxes. They haven't ruled out exit taxes, therefore I need to leave prior to that." Now, the reason that he thinks it's plausible that they would bring that in is very, very simple. The government has been, uh, overspending by five percent, uh, every single year. So we borrow five percent of the economy year on year on year. We're now close to a hundred percent of the economy as debt. Our debt servicing costs are more than military and education combined. We have enormous amounts of debt. Also, we're losing our standing in the world. The rest of the world that invests in government bonds are feeling less and less secure about the UK. Six prime ministers over the last ten years, um, and a complete political inability to cut spending. There is not one political party that's credible that has actually said, "We are willing to cut spending." We now spend more money on welfare than we collect in income taxes, right? That should be terrifying for everybody. Welfare, uh, should be a safety net, right? It should be a safety net. It should never be a hammock. It should be something that a small percentage of people who are going through a very, very tough time have access to a social safety net so that... And by the way, the reason for the social safety net is not for them, it's for the rest of us. It's essentially a bargain that we make with the productive people, the people who are demonstrating excellence in their lives, and you basically say, "Look, we don't want a bunch of desperate people running around. Let's make sure that no one lands on hard times to the extent that they're gonna become a nuisance," right? They're gonna have to break into people's houses and cars and destroy stuff. We need to create a safety net, a social safety net. That was essentially the understanding of what Social Security was about. It was never meant to be a hammock. It's like, "Oh, you ha-- you, you know, you can't work. Okay, lay down in this hammock over here." After World War II, when people had their limbs blown off, we had less than three percent of the population deemed unfit for work. Today, we have huge double-digit percentages of the population who are deemed unfit for work. Um, the, the whole history of the social safety net was always designed to be a, uh, a s- a small thing to protect society. Now it's gone completely of the other way. We pay more in Social Security than we collect in income taxes, right? Which is just bonkers. It's madness. We think we're a rich country, and we're totally not a rich country. If we were a state of the United States, we would be the fifty-first state. We'd be poorer than Mississippi. Um, the average Brit is significantly poorer than the average American. Um, we are slipping backwards very, very rapidly. We pay four times as much for our energy costs, which means we don't have industry anymore. We have an entire population that don't make anything or do anything, and they just want handouts from the government. That isn't sustainable. That's not an economy that can sustain itself. So all of that adds up to investors basically saying, "What are we investing into?" Right? "We're basically investing into an economy where, uh, you guys are just making bad decisions relative to our investment. So maybe you guys make decisions for political reasons, but you're certainly, you know, not making decisions that would make us feel good as investors. So we want higher and higher interest rates." So Chris Rokos is basically saying, okay, here's his, here's my interpretation. I, I've never... I don't know the guy, right? So my interpretation is that he's sitting there going, "Okay, bond markets are gonna go up. Mortgages are gonna go up. If bond markets and mortgages go up, a lot of people are gonna be very poor. There's gonna be a lot of people who drop out. Um, there's gonna be, uh, you know, a, a, a more stagnant economy." Therefore, the government's gonna refuse to cut spending still because no one's even talked about cutting spending. So therefore, they're going to introduce wealth taxes. They're gonna introduce exit taxes. They're gonna be doing all of those kind of very toxic things. And basically, he's sitting there going, "Well, I'm gonna be the butt of that joke. I'm not gonna be the butt of that joke. I'm gonna leave in advance. I'm gonna get my he- myself and my senior team out of this country. Uh, we can go to Greece. We can pay a flat rate of a hundred thousand euros, uh, and we can basically keep the rest ourselves." And then what will they do? Well, uh, they'll be sitting on hundreds of millions a year worth of non-taxes that they don't have to pay, and they'll put that aside. And when the UK economy crashes, then they'll go, "Oh, cool, now we've got a spare three, four hundred million we can come in, and we can buy up some of those assets at a discount." Um, it sucks, but that's the world, right? We live in grown-up land. We live-- We don't live in the land of milk and honey and the land of rainbows and unicorns. We live in the world of people who are self-interested, who make the best decisions for themselves and their investors. And you either snap into reality or you're on a cras-crash course with reality. And the UK is definitely on a crash course with reality. There's two ways to think about running any economy. And let's just say that, well, you know, let's just s-see if we can steelman both. Uh, the first way to run an economy is that you say, "We need to build an engine room of the economy where people who are absolutely extraordinary and excellent can succeed. People are incentivized to succeed. They're incentivized to work. They're incentivized to build businesses." And all of that results in a very strong engine room of the economy. Once we have a strong engine room, then we can put things attached to that engine, right? If we've got a strong engine, we can have welfare. We can have hospitals. We can have doctors. We can have nurses. We can have teachers. But all of it essentially hinges on having an engine room of the economy. So we have to incentivize that engine room, especially if we've made twenty years' worth of dumb decisions. We're gonna have to put some incentives in place to get that engine going. We're gonna have to build the engine, you know, from, from a fairly low base. Um, once the engine's running, we might be able to tax it a little bit heavier. But, uh, unfortunately, we dismantled the engine room of the economy. So that's idea number one. Idea number two is if you focus on, uh, social s-safety nets, Social Security, making sure every single person has dignity. If you focu-focus on investing at the bottom and making sure that the, they, that no one feels left behind, no one feels disadvantaged, that anyone who has any victim status whatsoever is coddled by the state, then that dignity or that will translate into dignity, which will translate into a desire to work and improve yourself and to, to get ahead. I wish that was true. I have never seen a, uh, I've never seen examples of that working. I have never seen people who are coddled suddenly go really well, right? I've never seen people who are, um, given, uh, s- you know, all of that stuff. Uh, I've never seen that happen. So we have to make a decision. Do we want to continue down this path, or do we wanna go and build an engine room of the economy? Chris Rockos has voted that he doesn't think that we're gonna build an engine room, and he's just gonna sit on the sidelines and wait and do business with the world until such time as things turn around. Anyway, that's, that's a thought. Um, keep that in mind. Also keep in mind, what does it mean for your business, your mortgage? Because higher interest rates means higher everything. If you've got a rent, uh, if you've got a rental property, lock in your rents. If you've got a mortgage, lock in your mortgages. Um, if you are sitting on debt, right, be, you know, variable debt, keep in mind that, um, the debt costs go up when the bond market gets more expensive 'cause it has a ripple effect through all forms of lending in an economy. Um, if you're sitting on wealth and sitting on income, you are currently in the s- in the firing line. You are the, you are the juicy antelope that the government wants to devour in order to stay, uh, stay afloat a little bit longer until such time as everyone reacts to this, everyone leaves, and then they have to cut spending.