Arecent headline in the Financial Times, echoed in many other publications, optimistically read “Hope Based on Interest Rate Cuts”. What is it that we are hoping for? Is it a recovery, improved investment returns or simply a return to an environment that we can understand and feel comfortable in? Put simply, are we hoping for a return to “normality”?

Times of great economic stress are invariably termed as a “crisis” and always bring about change. Some changes are short term and some are longer term, but once the dust settles and the “crisis” is over, experience has taught us that it is rarely, if ever, a return to the way it was before. My grandfather lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929. My father, who was aged 16 at the time, was taken out of his school and left home to fend for himself by getting a job as a shop assistant.