John Stepek

And then you had big consumer goods group, Reckitt Benckiser, they came out and their share price has been falling since February, but on the day they fell by another 5% because they said the disruption in the Middle East

has hit our sales, like for like sales are much lower than they expected and I think what this kind of drives home is that the market is now at the point where it can't really put a price on stuff until it starts to see the impact coming through and I think that's the problem we sort of sit there and like it's so reflexive it's like we look at the prices and we say well the market's not reacting so it can't be that bad but the market is waiting to get data from the real world because

It's kind of like, well, you know, how do we know what's going to happen next?

There is no way to put a price on it.

So I think we're just going to keep seeing this as the bad data feeds through.

Maybe some of the kind of impacts that we thought we were going to see earlier on will start to happen because basically you need a kind of prove it moment, particularly because everyone's got conditioned.

Well, I guess it ties in with this overall thing that, you know, whatever, the 2010s were like the long duration decade.

Basically, time didn't matter.

And that was partly tied up with interest rates.

But, you know, the kind of far future, if you were going to make a load of money in the far future, that was worth as much as making a load of money tomorrow.

So you bought the companies that were going to make a load of money in the far future because the future seemed predictable.

Because I think the predictability horizon of the world generally has shrunk to,

massively.

So it's a kind of short duration world and that's also reflected in the market's sense of visibility.

If you want to get highfalutin about it, otherwise you could just say, well actually nobody knows what's going to happen next, particularly whenever Trump or the Iranians can turn around and say something completely different from day to day.

So I just think the market's it's rational that the market's discounting ability has shrunk massively.

You can.

I mean, I'm...

I actually think the underlying strength of the UK economy is better than most people had thought.

And I've thought that for a while.