Rage does not begin to describe how I feel at funding yet again the incompetence of yet another adviser company and another investment firm accommodating client’s chasing pots of gold at the end of rainbows!
To assuage my rage, I decided to look at just how much the FCA has collected in fines since January 2013, thinking they could be offset against such outrages and I found it was in excess of £337m, on top of the £446m it takes to run Canary Wharf.
Now where does all this money go, one might ask?
To reduce the cost of regulation? No, there is no rebate on the £446m cost to run the FCA, MAS or the FSCS; back to IFAs and other financial players who help fund regulation – MAS and the FSCS? No.
It goes to the Treasury. Into that vast, voracious, never sated maw of perpetual waste and ineptitude, and it has been gorging itself since the Financial Services Bill came into force in April 2012.
So we foot the bill yet again, the FCA covers its costs, while the Treasury lives by the philosophy of, “And my more having would be as a sauce to make me hunger more: that I should forge quarrels unjust against the good and loyal, destroying them for wealth” (indebted to William Shakespeare).
Andy Baxter
Principal, Wealth Management
Newton Aycliffe, Co Durham
.png?source=design-system&width=126)