Ian McKnight

Aoifinn Devitt: We would love to wish you a happy New Year from everyone at 50 Faces Productions. While we are busy curating Series 1 of 2026, we’d like to bring you some thoughts that we gathered over the course of the Christmas and New Year break. It was great to sit down with a friend of mine and previous guest on the podcast, Ian McKnight, for his inaugural podcast called The Long and Short of It. In it, we engage in our typical banter. We speak about everything from recent political developments on the geopolitical stage as well as to our thoughts on markets. We discuss a little bit of what’s going on in our lives, and we discuss what our thoughts are in terms of the investment mindset and investor mindset as we head into 2026. I hope you enjoy this inaugural episode of Ian’s podcast, and we look forward to coming to you both weekly with the Markets Happy Hour podcast, as well as weekly with our 50 Faces interviews very soon. Happy New Year, everyone.

Ian McKnight: Hello and welcome to The Long and Short of It, an occasional podcast where we bring you economic market and investment commentary with a bit of real life and good humor thrown in. I’m Ian McKnight, a senior advisor at Cartwright’s Giant Shoulders Hinane and CIO of Tontine Trust Fintech. And I’m joined by Aoifinn Devitt, absolute legend of the industry, senior investment advisor at Moneta and several pension schemes to boot, the host you’ll know of the 40 Faces and Markets Happy Hour podcast. Welcome, Aoifinn, and happy New Year.

Aoifinn Devitt: Happy New Year to you too, Ian. Great to chat with you here.

Ian McKnight: It’s very exciting indeed. So there’s, I mean, where do we start, right? We want want to, we to give listeners to this podcast a bit of, a bit of our thoughts on the whole craziness that’s just been going on. And with so much material, we’ll have to be parsimonious in what we say, won’t we?

Aoifinn Devitt: Exactly. Well, it’s been a crazy Christmas period. I hope you had a good time. I was relaxing in France, but with an inundation of news flow, it seemed, uh, there was a lot to get through in terms of rethinking the new order of the world and politics, finances, economics. And there was barely time to make many New Year’s resolutions?

Ian McKnight: Well, how about we have a little chew over some of the Christmas festive news flow, which frankly was just nonstop, and then have a little look forward to the next year or two and see what we think about that. So maybe if we start, I guess, with something we brought up in a chat we had on one of your podcasts before Christmas about the Venezuela situation and the impact on the oil markets., but also the knock-on of two precious metals, both of which have been big stories financially over the peak last week too. And.

Aoifinn Devitt: No, and you have caught— you actually called this, I think, in our last discussion. Well, I was finishing out the year of 2026, looking back, looking at this phenomenal resilience from the US economy, and I’d seen the term that 2025 was a defining year for metals. And that was something I was running with on Christmas Eve as I was preparing my kind of Christmas podcast. Didn’t do Christmas Day, but Christmas, the day after Christmas, Boxing Day. And then no sooner was I then looking at the notes to prepare my New Year’s Eve podcast, the defining year for metals had taken another turn because we’d seen some pretty sharp volatility in the silver market and an alteration of some of the margin requirements by the CME and very sharp falls in silver and some rumors circulating which have completely gone to bed at the moment. That one large financial institution had been caught with these rising margin requirements. So it was a specter of another kind of whale trade or something capturing a large too-big-to-fail bank in its wake. And again, the perils of leverage. So it was a real kind of blast from the past that particular week, I think, in terms of just what we were seeing in terms of silver. That was one theme. And then in terms of what else, the AI, geopolitics, I think we now know from Venezuelan news, geopolitics still does not really move markets. I think Venezuela as an oil producer, what is it, number 18, seriously dilapidated and under capacity infrastructure, and as well as its impact on world GDP, no better than minuscule. So certainly it’s clouding our social media feeds and the headlines, but in terms of its impact on the economy, I at this point am guided towards thinking it’ll be very minimal in terms of its impact on markets.

Ian McKnight: Hmm, I think that’s a very good point. So we’ve seen this for the past few invasions, wars, and crises. The markets tend to just take them in their stride. And it’s a very modern phenomenon to not have a massive panic when things like this happen. What are your thoughts on why that might be?

Aoifinn Devitt: I do think that it’s really history has taught us that these geopolitical events tend to be flash in the pan as far as markets are concerned. There could also be the inability maybe to potentially extrapolate from a very large, almost abstract event into tangible kitchen table issues that drive stocks. That could be just a disconnect where we can’t process it. So we therefore don’t process it and we just focus on what we can process, which are backward-looking earnings statements. That could be one reason for that particular disconnect. It could be that markets are just so resilient today that they run on their own steam and they don’t need to take into account geopolitical events. But it is a great question as to why this is occurring. And it does seem you that, know, looking back over the last 18 months or even longer, that has seemed to be the mood that geopolitical events can dictate headlines. They can certainly hint at a shifting world order, but that shifting world order, even tariffs as they relate to the world order, do not tend to impact markets that much day to day.

Ian McKnight: So you’ve touched on tariffs there, which is relevant to the US. What are your thoughts around that? I’ve got some thoughts on what might happen there.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, it’s interesting. The— you mentioned what that may be, some of the heuristics that maybe come into place as to why geopolitics aren’t affecting markets. And one of the other, I think, trends and behavioral biases I’m seeing is a tendency to believe that causation is instant, maybe unilateral in terms of that. For example, interest rates being dropped will instantly lead to a flood of new credit and drive up inflation. Or the opposite, in effect, this more stringent monetary policy, more restrictive policy would lead to lower inflation. Equally, there was the expectation that tariffs would immediately lead to higher inflation, not taking into effect many of the intervening factors that can get in the way of a very strict causation. And I think we are also assuming perhaps as markets open today, we’re recording this on January 5th, Monday, that there will be an immediate effect on the oil price. From the Venezuelan affairs as well as perhaps a short trade around Canada. And these effects are not immediate. So I’m not sure whether this is again a cognitive bias that investors assume that causation is straight line, single cause, and also immediate. So I don’t think these things are immediate. I think that that’s one of the things that we do need to factor in.

Ian McKnight: Because it always strikes me, so in the bond markets, for example, even when things are well heralded, they often wait until it’s actually happened before moving. Whereas I think what seems to happen now in other areas is lots of— there’s so much news constantly that, as you say, identifying genuine cause-effect, this is a nightmare for economics professors, right, when they’re teaching their classes what should happen and what does happen. And in the past, as we’ve seen, sometimes it’s the complete opposite. But it’s a muddied somewhere in the middle of theory versus actuality. And this cause and effect thing in, for example, the stock market, we’re looking at massive multiples, which we’ll come back to in a minute, I think, because that’s particularly interesting. And you’ve got a delay in realization of what’s actually going on. But fundamentally to me, and back to this commodities complex, Isn’t it all fundamentally cost of energy and raw materials that should be the inflationary factor? Because you’ve got the rate situation has just got a mind of its own now, and the central banks have different remits than they used to. And they’re also arguably pretty politicized. They’re not as independent as they might want to pretend.

Aoifinn Devitt: It’s a great point. And I think, yes, our assumption that an easy monetary environment would drive inflation is usually based on these demand factors. And in effect, much of the inflation around COVID was supply-driven, supply-side driven. And certainly on the energy side, with oil being suppressed as it has been, or at least the price coming down, and it’s still down about 20% on the year, on the full year, trading in the 50s, that would be a conducive environment to having lower, at least energy prices at the pump, at least as far as that kind of big sticker price of a gallon of gas that President Trump seems to focus on. Whereas we do know, though, that electricity is rising in price, particularly in the UK. We know that it’s taking an increasingly large share of that inflation budget, and that is something that’s causing a lot of sensitivity to communities in the US that are concerned about data centers essentially devouring their energy allocation and driving prices higher. As well as just the affordability point more generally. So I think that why— and I found a very interesting stat at the end of the year that the clean energy index was up over 40% over the course of 2025. And this is against a backdrop of incontrovertible headwinds from the Trump administration.

Ian McKnight: Yeah, but isn’t this just a global phenomenon where governments are just hose piping money? This is basically a subsidized industry to a degree, and you are being political, so it’s all linked. This confluence of politics and economics, because standalone, I can’t see that they’d have ever got off the ground, these offshore wind farms and so on.

Aoifinn Devitt: But I think it does illustrate this 40% rise, and there was an interesting article in Bloomberg that was shorting regular oil and long the clean energy index, and that would have generated 80% according to John Authers’ Hindsight Capital, which is of course a backward-looking artificial construct. But at the same time, I think this does illustrate that the demand for energy, and this gets back to your AI point, that is only heading in one direction. So if we can— Yeah, so this.

Ian McKnight: Is great for it. Sorry to interrupt you, but it’s like the oil majors are probably quite interesting at the minute. And this whole Venezuela thing, which fundamentally, whether it’s caused by or it’s just a nice corollary of what they’ve done, is to keep the oil flowing in, this heavy oil they’ve got that’s nicely refined on the south coast of the US. Of course it is.

Aoifinn Devitt: It’s— well, this is a very interesting time for oil majors. On the one hand, they seem to be getting the promise, a very vague promise, I’d say. It’s been difficult to— there is always this guardrail against whether we should take President Trump literally or seriously or both. And I think taking him literally with some of the statements around Venezuela would be a little misleading because some of them simply have been contradicted the next day or simply will be difficult to imagine, for example, running the country from the US. But what has been quite clear in the rhetoric has been this statement around reclaiming stolen oil or regaining rights to oil. I think that has been a narrative that has been front and center of the recent developments and a suggestion that the US and maybe even multinational oil majors would be involved in essentially reclaiming some of that oil and certainly getting a right to develop it. That is another point of cause and effect, though, And certainly in terms of timescale, because it’s by all accounts, this could be something that would be 10 years in the developing, this under-invested in oil infrastructure within Venezuela. And it would certainly not be a plain sailing situation given the fractious economic situation.

Ian McKnight: It’s a decent strategic shift, and not least with the Russian and China influence over there. And I heard there’s like Hezbollah presence and Cuba’s interference and you know, potentially Cuba. They’ve got their eye on them now as well. So, but Donald Trump to me always comes— he’s like a bloke in a pub, isn’t he, who’s had somebody tell him in probably reasonable detail what they’re doing, why, how he should present it, but what it really means. And he just blurts out things he shouldn’t blurt out. So, and it’s quite amusing. The first time I noticed this was when he talked about you know, injecting yourself with bleach, as I think people were accusing. But what somebody obviously briefed you, say, look, we’ve got like 50 different trials going on. One of them is effectively screening your blood, passing it through a sort of cleaner and putting it back. And it’s effectively like you’re sort of bleaching it out. And he’s like said this, and then of course everybody— somebody died, you know, I can’t remember, doing silly things. But he almost just tells you some of his briefings without meaning to. And clearly, I doubt very much whether they’d have wanted apart from the obvious oil rights that were being withheld, that they had a legitimate grievance about, that they would have wanted front and center, as you say, the, oh, we’re just doing this for oil and money. And because actually, there’s about 5 different reasons that they would reasonably have wanted to do this— to stop the flow of cocaine into North America, to moot the influence of other large global players in their backyard, And any one of them is a more legitimate reason than we just want them. ‘Cause it’s a nice corollary, nice to have, isn’t it, for America? There’s loads of oil in America, right? You could frack, baby, frack. There’s a ton of it. They’re not wanting for it. It’s just a strategic play on the oil for them.

Aoifinn Devitt: There was an excellent ex-post over the weekend by a trader who posts a lot on commodities, and her theory was that oil was a narrative essentially that was convenient and easy to understand, but it was actually— that was basically a show. And that behind the scenes, it was that trifecta of, as you mentioned, the bad actors as far as the US geopolitical scene were concerned, trifecta of China, Iran, and Russia, all of whom had operational interests in Venezuela. This was again the Monroe Doctrine in full force and effect in terms of the the desire to strategically mute these actors in various ways or neutralize them by taking this presence and removing the kind of common factor of Venezuela from the equation. Certainly those actors did not step up in defense of Venezuela during the recent actions. And it’s been, I think, very little has been said. But I’d love to take up that theory of how you did the drunk in the pub. Um, so shooting from the hip with the latest.

Ian McKnight: Well, Donald Trump doesn’t drink, of course, so he’s just in a pub.

Aoifinn Devitt: But sure, No, but how do you treat that drunk in the pub? How does one— um, I no longer drink, so I’m often maybe the sober, uh, you know, person at the table, but how do you tend to treat the drunk at the pub? You kind of go, you nod your head, you go, okay, okay, great, yeah, sure, right. And I think that maybe that is the, uh, the attitude we need to take. I mean, it’s not just shooting from the hip about running Venezuela. There was another X post, as you said, I probably spent far too much time this weekend or this past week on X with the map of Greenland with an American flag interposed on top of that. And that was posted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, who is by some accounts very close to the president. And this had then not only sparked some outrage online, but certainly well over 20 million views. The time I last looked, but it has now sparked responses from the administrative head of Greenland as well as the Danish Prime Minister.

Ian McKnight: So it’s outrageous. I mean, they basically want to buy Greenland. That’s what’s going on here. It’s not for sale last time I checked, but I don’t doubt he’ll bid them at some point.

Aoifinn Devitt: It’s— but I think what I might— my point is really that these gestures, which maybe are— are they to be taken seriously? Are they provocative? Are they jokes? Are actually sparking quite serious responses. And I think this is— are we being trolled with some of this, this flooding of the zone? And but I think they’re all sparking interesting conversations. The winners, I believe, in 2026 of this increased rhetoric will be most likely defense stocks.

Ian McKnight: Right. And the consultancy universe that goes around Booz Allen, I forget who it is. Yeah. Mm, that’s fascinating. So back to the US and what’s driving that, because, you know, it’s been all the talk, and I know you’ve done a lot of work on AI, the Magnificent Seven, or MAG Seven. He’s even got abbreviated. It’s so cool to talk about. But I mean, I’m almost yearned off about it, but there’s still loads to go. And Tesla in particular, I think, is worth exploring, because what I want to get to on on the equity markets is, first of all, the jobs, which I go on about relentlessly, and there was updates yesterday we can talk about if you want or not. But the multiples that have been applied to different levels of growth, and are those multiples due for a correction? So notwithstanding the growth may or may not be coming, and it may or may not be supporting some of those stocks, are some of these, because of AI, going to even be there by your payback period? And this concept of terming out an investment Would anybody rationally pay £100 for something giving them £3 a year if they didn’t think it was going to make it to the end? It’s like a bad bond.

Aoifinn Devitt: Exactly. Well, great, great question. And I suppose we’ve been kind of wrestling with this valuation point all year. I think just getting back to the Magnificent Seven, even though they have led the conversation, not only because of their dominance and representing 40% of the S&P, as well as their dominating headlines, certainly capital expenditure and just the whole AI story, their actual performance over the year was somewhat lackluster in some cases. And probably you mentioned Tesla, and Tesla had a particularly volatile start to the year. It was of course tied to Elon Musk’s role in government and Doge, and his, he was, that was perhaps most accentuated around the aftermath of Liberation Day. So just looking at a stock chart of Tesla, of Tesla here, and it didn’t really start to recover until September, October, and is just back to where it started the year essentially. So not a particularly illustrious run, I’d say, for Tesla. What the stocks that really did stand out were Alphabet, and we know that they are stealing a march on Nvidia when it comes to their AI models, and Nvidia itself. But if you take out, um, Alphabet and Nvidia from the Mag 7 chart, we’ve had a fairly lackluster plodding along recovering of what they lost, but not a particularly strong, strong year in absolute terms. And then just getting back to valuations, I suppose the key problem for extrapolating around now is that we do have solid earnings just ongoing, exceeding expectations coming out of the US. We know they have fat margins that have been defended, and that’s really what differentiates the US from other countries around the world is just that sheer robustness. Earnings picture.

Ian McKnight: It’s the world in a continent.

Aoifinn Devitt: Exactly. Yeah.

Ian McKnight: And I think the jobs is fundamental to it all. If you start seeing those come off, you’re soft— not even a landing, is it? But you sort of soft playthrough of that, uh, doesn’t, doesn’t work. But whilst they hold up, that earnings robustness that you mentioned carries on. And so it’s quite curious to see what it will be. It’s not— we’ve assessed that it’s not a esoteric political war-based shock. What is it that would cause some correction in that? And how long does it take the market to realize they’re paying chronically over long-term rates for income?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, well, we’ve got back to, we were talking about cognitive biases and how we’re extrapolating causation and short-term and long-term effects. And I think the other problem is this kind of average. I had a guest on my podcast who described the average as a lie. And we do tend to focus on averages. And when we look at the average, say, earnings growth, again, the S&P, that the average earnings growth is supposed to be at 15% and double digit for the third straight year in 2026. And the estimated earnings growth rate to be 15%, which is above the trailing growth rate 10-year average of 8%.

Ian McKnight: What’s that mean, a median?

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, that, that’s the mean. And then if you break it down, the real estate companies are languishing with a 5% earnings growth. Whereas technology is, you know, closer to 30% earnings growth. So this average of 15% is quite distorted and not representing necessarily the, the entire picture.

Ian McKnight: Very high growth coming from the big.

Aoifinn Devitt: Large-Cap growth, and particularly technology. And why? I mean, this is of course backward-looking. What we’re seeing, staggering growth numbers which probably cannot be extrapolated in a straight-line way into the future. And then the, similarly, um, the The CapEx requirements will be significant. That will certainly start to eat away.

Ian McKnight: At— Well, that takes us back to a topic we’ve discussed before, which is barriers to entry issues and why it’s different this time kind of chats. So looking back to 2000 and you had myriad startups and non-revenue-producing internet companies, many of which disappeared entirely, many of which went on to be those big names today. However, in AI, the CapEx is so vast to keep up and enhance their offering. And you’ve also got this sea change of people, perhaps I think going from using Google to looking at their Grok or to whichever else they seem to have— ChatGPT and so on, and others are available. So, and this led to a war for being the new search engine, such that when you Google stuff now, the AI is the first answer, its own meta one. Comes up at you. And so there’s a sort of a behavioral adoption piece for those, for those big ones that are already spending. And because it’s concentrated in those 7, you don’t sort of have this, oh God, what if they’re overvalued, in the way things were overvalued back in ’00 that were just never going to fly. What do you think about that? Yeah, is it different this time?

Aoifinn Devitt: Those, those classic words about the 400 Most dangerous words in the English language. I’d say a few things are different. Yes, these companies have solid balance sheets. They have, in case of Alphabet, but not the case of OpenAI actually, a very solid existing business that can subsidize the spending on CapEx needed for their AI buildout and can also, that it gives them that they have the ability to issue debt. There’s always, they’re oversubscribed, these offerings. And there is, I’d say, a very solid capital formation picture there for, say, for Alphabet. But what’s different, what’s not different is the tendency for market participants to buy the dream, buy, to drink the Kool-Aid and to kind of overestimate the impact of certain, of the growth will continue on the same trajectory and underestimate the ability for customer behavior to reach saturation point. And you mentioned the switching between models. I do think that this switching is indicative of the exploratory and experimental stage, that there will be a choosing of a model that works for your needs. And your needs may not be the needs of a kind of a vibe coder that needs the fastest, most powerful model available to, say, somebody doing biotechnology research. You may need something very basic that has already been satisfied by the current model. So there will be, I believe, a discrimination by consumers in terms of what they need and what they don’t need. And this will be a reckoning for many of the, the AI companies because they will not, I believe, see the same growth that they’ve seen up to now.

Ian McKnight: Well, I think that that’s almost inevitable because growth has to taper to something eventually once you saturate. But is it— I saw some narrative yesterday or this morning on a news feed about potentially the commoditization of that Mag-7 universe. What do you think about that?

Aoifinn Devitt: That would accord exactly with what I’ve been thinking in terms of, you know, have we reached saturation point? I’ve spoken about 2026 being the year of enough. A good friend of mine called Brian Portnoy, you would enjoy him. He’s not afraid to speak his mind. He has a company called Shaping Wealth and he speaks about the— or his book called Shaping Wealth and his company speaks a lot about the idea of what are we seeking to achieve in our retirement or is funded contentment. And that there’s that concept of enough, that we’re not always striving for more, that if you can actually be content with what we have, that is the goal, and being able to fund that, that that is enough of a goal.

Ian McKnight: As a human being, I would agree with that, but as a society and a planet, we never ever have enough. Well, that’s Ferris Bueller’s wisdom. You can never go too far.

Aoifinn Devitt: That’s an interesting topic. I mean, I think you were getting into the philosophical now, but what I do believe on this enough point, we can at times say call timeout perhaps on future development. We’ve already, I’ve mentioned before the pushback around data center buildouts and the price of energy. There will be timeout, I believe, on the consumers’ ready adoption of AI because they will have reached either saturation point. They won’t be, we’ve already seen this point with some of the AI videos and AI content and even the discussion that influencer roles when it comes to marketing, maybe reaching some saturation point. So these are fascinating pointers to, I think, to note is that how quickly do we change how we consume, who we listen to, creator economies getting a lot of attention today. Are big brands losing their way because they haven’t got that? So all of these enough, I think affordability mentioned at the very beginning, mentioned that the oil price, the price of gas at the pump for US drivers, has there been appointed— they’ve just elected a socialist, Democratic Socialist mayor in New York City on the platform of affordability.

Ian McKnight: Who’S just put the tube fares, their subway fares, up to $3, I believe, having promised to ax them to zero.

Aoifinn Devitt: There, there you go. Do as I do, not as I say, or listen to— watch what I do, not what I say. And this will be a fascinating thing to watch in terms of also just whether these There were some pictures of Mamdani recently, the mayor, going to rent-controlled buildings and looking at the state of them. Arguably, the reason they’re in this state is because with rent control, the owners have not been able to actually make the upgrades that would be required in any old building. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have rent control and perhaps state-of-the-art maintenance.

Ian McKnight: The failure of socialism, a bit of a theme. With Venezuela’s collapse and rent controls not working.

Aoifinn Devitt: It’s, it’s been popular. It’s been— I mean, that’s one that certainly in the US I did not perhaps take fully into account, just the, the cultural backdrop to that push. And I first started to see it during the, um, the presidential election, um, in when, you 2024, know, where we had Donald Trump and Kamala Harris running, and this Kamala or the assessment of the socialist, the communist undertones. And it came up during the Bernie Sanders candidacy 4 years previously, but certainly I did not appreciate that cultural backdrop against socialism.

Ian McKnight: It’s a massive polarized society. It’s not just in the US, to a degree here. You have, you have, and basically the angst is from, is about the wealth gap. And it’s not really an earnings Gini coefficient wealth It’s a wealth gap. And the problem is, to my eyes, I’ve discussed with you before, is governments just spending too much money, depreciating their currency, and making people hide out in assets that inflate. So the haves have more, and the have-nots literally can’t get there because they’re precluded. And as the need for more spending results in higher taxation. The likelihood of them escalating at that social scale diminishes further, amplifying the wealth effect, the wealth Gini coefficient. Until that’s fixed, you’ll just keep getting more and more angry people realizing that they’re the victim of this. Frankly, the government just need to stop spending too much money telling you you just need more and more people to prop up what is effectively a Ponzi scheme. It is. And at some point as a planet, and this is very philosophical but actually real, there will be a maximum population on Earth. And at that point, you will not be able to go any further. So working back from there, there has to be a reckoning before that point or at that point certainly. So why not get it out of the way and stop making everybody’s lives harder? You know, just stop spending too much. That would be my answer to this.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, this is why I love conversations with you because you never— there are so many rich layers to what you just said. And I think a couple of things. One is we’ve spoken before about the lack of influence of geopolitics on markets. Does the K-shaped economy and the wealth gap and the rise of inequality, does that have an impact on markets? I showed a slide recently in the Markets Happy Hour podcast, which showed that the top 10% of earners in the US are responsible for 50% of spending. So clearly the bottom 10% are not moving the needle when it comes to those earnings numbers that we mentioned before. Maybe they’re downsizing into the dollar store, Dollar General, and they’re not spending money at Chipotle because they can’t afford a $15 salad bowl or burrito bowl. And I’ve never been able to justify that personally. So, you know, I’ve always been surprised at the rise of that, that class of spending. But so if they’re not really moving spending, what is this going to mean? I think you and I both know that it drives populist politics. It can drive socialist politics. We spoke about that. So that can then drive wealth flight, which we can see. There’s a lot of wealth, whether it’s exiting the UK or exiting New York and going to Miami. So there will be that. But does that really move the needle at the end of the day? It’s hard to tell. But I think what does, the incontrovertible common factor that is associated with positive outcomes for every member of society is economic growth. And I had this conversation down in Argentina in the summer. I was there in August before suppose the— I the affirmation of Javier Milei’s policies in September. So there was quite a bit of concern at that point that he would not get that congressional affirmation and that it could be sidetracked or waylaid. Whereas some of these cuts, as you mentioned, were critical in Venezuela, what he also successfully did was kind of a little mini Doge down there in terms of cutting out middlemen, stripping away some layers of bureaucracy. He was, of course, the original chainsaw man. It was to see that the adoption of that, despite the fact that there had been some austerity resulting from it, it was seen as the essential must-have before growth could take place.

Ian McKnight: Yes. I mean, it’s a template, that’s the template, right? And until it gets followed by major Western countries, we’re just going to keep languishing like this, to my eye.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, growth is the answer. And that’s why I’m so committed to the UK growth, living here now.

Ian McKnight: Because ours has been stagnant, stagnant for 20 years, really.

Aoifinn Devitt: Right. And I think some of that’s due to the, perhaps the ecosystem is not conducive to encouraging venture capital. Certainly there have been more listings happening elsewhere. We’ve had the many pension funds forced into fixed income instruments. Some of that has been a regulatory requirement in order to shore up funding ratios. Pension funds have exited, foreign investors have exited the market, stock markets, the British stock market, the FTSE has shrunk as a component of global markets. It’s all of these factors, but I don’t think it’s too late. I tend to be, I think fundamentally at heart, an optimist and believe that it’s not too late to kickstart growth in the UK. I think we’re on the right path with government policy and with some of the recognition of what needs to be done. And this goes back to one of your points about some of the green energy lobby. You mentioned getting a peak, reaching a point where we go ex-growth, we can’t, the population can’t grow anymore, it just reaches saturation point. If growth is sustainable, to use one of those buzzwords that were popular a few years ago with along with DEI and ESG, Sustainable growth, that is as part of it. And I do think that local investing in the UK is a form of sustainable growth because it’s— it may— you may be sacrificing some return at the margin, but you are creating communities, building places, investing in agriculture. You’re seeing biodiversity enhanced. You’re building new carbon-neutral buildings. So this is sustainable growth. I’m very optimistic about that.

Ian McKnight: You have a conflation on the wealth thing because of the population aging. So it’s not just the growing population, the sort of sanguine growth generally, but you are— I think David Willets mentioned it years ago in his The Pinch book. Remember the Tory MP, Two Brains Willets he was called, and he wrote on this and it was how the baby boomers, he said, have stolen our, you know, future and how they should give it back and all this. But effectively, we’re kind of at that point where baby boomers, bless them, are about to, you know, reach the end of their, their time here. And it’s going to pass whether it drops a generation or drops two generations. And you’ve seen all the talk about inheritance planning and, and the second order of the government’s recognizing this, trying to lick their lips. How can we get that? How can we get it? That’s the wrong answer. Because that’s needed lower down the the youth, young people without jobs and without prospects and without the chance of buying a house, frankly. To take that away as well would be the final insult, as it were, of that generation that has enriched itself beyond any reasonable measure and leaves everybody else to pay for it because they’ve geared it all up, of course. I think that story is fundamental to understanding the spend and wealth inequalities, not just— and it’s all linked, of course— not just the fact that, you know, if you do a day’s labour, it doesn’t seem to move the needle on getting you wealthy, as it were, because it’s all stashed in these older demographics.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, you touched there on two topics that, again, the last two that I just brought up, and maybe it’s a good place to To just kind of end my thoughts on the year, but two points you made is one, the baby boomers and how they had it so— nobody ever had it so good as the baby boomers. They earned more than their parents. They had a nice trajectory, stable jobs, built nice retirements, and are now sitting around these wonderful houses that they own, and they’re doing better than their kids could ever hope to do. And but yet, on the other hand, they are downsizing, baby boomers. They’re living longer perhaps than they thought they would. And they’re downsizing, and that’s actually opening up the real estate market for first-time home buyers who are, it’s granted, older than they would’ve been in the past. They’ve waited longer to own a home, but because they’re waiting, that perfect point will synchronize that as baby boomers are selling, they’ll be entering the market. And maybe if the new Fed chairman has his way, and we’ll be seeing lower rates in the US at that point. So the housing market isn’t quite the basket case or disaster as we might have thought. And in fact, the baby boomers do have to go somewhere. And there is that kind of, that is there. But the second point, I think this is something I talked about again at the beginning of the year, is this new nihilism. And one of the other, as I said, far too many time on X rabbit holes over the Christmas period was this idea of, you know, that it was in the Wall Street Journal that essentially, we’ve the current generation has essentially given up on traditional wealth creation. They have seen it’s not possible. They’re out of the housing ladder. And they are instead focusing on speculation and perhaps, you know, gambling, throwing it all on black and hoping that they’ll be the next unicorn founder. But that they— well, you see this.

Ian McKnight: Don’T you, with the Insta-ready generation that make fortunes from a few, you know, videos, whatever it is they do. And, but you might also see, I’ve mentioned this to you before, that with the dawn of AI, you could see people with without much experience or savvy, being able to use the AI to do something that actually sells. You know, ask the AI, what is it that will sell? How do I do it? Can you do it for me? And they sit there just talking. And ask the right question, you would have to be pretty bright. But you know, the barrier to entry might actually, for many, be quite lower in that new world. Um, and, and there’s an interesting corollary point there on the meaning of brand in the, in the next decade, you know, does that carry the same weight it does? Which takes us nicely back to Tesla, actually, because the, um, the, the cult following that it does have of, of, of investors who, who are Elon um, fans, will, will hang on his every word and read everything there is to say about it. But their, their story would be, okay, robotaxis, everyone’s going to want a robotaxi, they’re going to take over the Well, of course, yeah, Tesla Robotaxi or the competition that will inevitably follow, you know, which one wins and does it actually, does it work and are they the winner? They’re big questions and that’s possibly why it’s lagged some of the others. But all the other things it has, like the robots thing, you know, everyone’s going to have a robot. Well, will they? And if they do, are you going to be the one providing it? And I think that those two, if they’re right, they’re going to make a fortune. If they’re not, Um, you know, they’re going to have a bloody nose. So it’s a really interesting one to chat about because it ties all of this together. It’s sort of a little microcosm of the economy.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I think where our conversation started is where we, you know, I, I come back to that. You said I— the mistake that when you look at your social media feed, you have it on all, read all. You don’t look for tailored news because of the echo chamber. Confirmation biases that we already know. And that is exactly what I think this nihilism article revealed, is it was profoundly depressing to think that all young people might think that way, to think that the rise of Polly Market and Kelshee and other betting vehicles and sports betting has increased dramatically is a sign that people just have given enough. And usually, as you know, lottery ticket sales are higher in poorer neighborhoods because it’s that when you’ve nothing to lose, you know, that little bit of a gamble and so much to gain, and you think about those odds quite differently. And they essentially were saying that the current generation has nothing to lose. They are at this place of such degradation in terms of their financial outlook that they’re just, you know, gambling it all.

Ian McKnight: So what we need, Aoife, is hope. We need hope for the generation and for us. So what’s getting you all excited and optimistic for the next year?

Aoifinn Devitt: Let’s start with that article. The backlash to that article was like, well, you know, my kids aren’t like that, or I don’t see that the only answer is betting on these casinos, you know, buying it, getting into the gambling platforms, that I actually see that things are a little different is perspective. The answer is hope, but the answer is also perspective. What am I hopeful? I think, as you mentioned, with AI, it can be empowering. I think these pushbacks around the ethical case for AI, the moral case the social media ban in Australia, as well as the desire for AI to just slow down, the rise of awareness of the anxious generation, the effect of social media on our kids. You know, we are not amoral as a society. And I think that is, that is reassuring. There’s no necessary formula for the moral code that dictates how quickly we accept change to our existence. But there is a code.. And if we were to hope that we bend towards it over time, that, that gives me hope. And again, just back to that growth phenomenon, I think when we— things have to get sometimes to rock bottom in terms of perspective and outlook before something gets done. And I do think with the UK in particular, you know, such— and probably the last budget was probably, I think, a rock bottom point. That was when we last spoke.

Ian McKnight: It certainly was.

Aoifinn Devitt: I think since then it was seen as an anti-growth budget. And I think that the calls, the catcalls were far and wide in terms of this has gone too far.

Ian McKnight: Yeah. Well, thank you for your thoughts. And I guess we should wish everybody listening a very, very happy, fruitful, and successful 2026 and healthy, most important commodity of all. And a bit like you, I’m off to get some snow while there still is some. And hopefully we’ll reconvene to chat over again and see how that January is playing out.

Aoifinn Devitt: Thank you, Ian. Fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Ian McKnight: Lovely to speak to you, Finn. God bless. Thank you all. Bye.