How real is the ‘mortgage crisis’ and what, if anything, can be done to relieve it? BBC vox pops of borrowers whose monthly costs have already rocketed or who face imminent rate resets at 6 per cent or worse certainly give a dramatic impression. But in reality this is a slow-motion car-crash – for Rishi Sunak as well as the afflicted – in which some 1.4 million mortgages (out of a UK total of 13.2 million) will move to higher rates sometime this year and another million next year.

Forgive my arithmetic, by the way, but that looks like 18 per cent of the mortgage-holding population who constitute 28 per cent of all households, so just one in 20 households overall. And that compares with one in five households who live in rented accommodation, whose rents have risen by 10 per cent in the past year, who do not have the long-term consolation and security of bricks-and-mortar ownership, and who seem to be attracting rather less sympathy than about-to-be-squeezed borrowers in the current wave of media emotion.

So let’s keep this ‘crisis’ in proportion. But in a post-pandemic era when governments are expected to shield citizens from all forms of pain, what next? A reintroduction of mortgage interest tax relief – abolished by Gordon Brown in 2000 as a middle-class perk – could cost the Treasury many billions and would have to be matched by an equivalent benefit for renters. A pause in Bank of England rate rises purely to make life easier for borrowers would be a nonsense, the opposite of what rate rises are for and a mockery of central bank independence; rates would then have to stay higher for longer if they were ever to have the desired effect of quelling inflation.

No, the only thing ministers can do is try to hasten inflation’s fall by talking wage hikes down, easing labour shortages and supply blockages, and praying the pound will strengthen as rates rise, to make imports cheaper. No doubt they’ll also go for the grandstanding option of calling for lenders to be lenient with struggling borrowers.

The only thing the Bank of England can do, meanwhile, is stride towards its rate peak in two or three more steps, declaring confidently that this is the only medicine but it always cures inflation in the end. But that doesn’t sound like today’s stumbling Bank, does it? And our situation is made worse on all economic fronts if markets think we have no one in power or authority who really knows what they’re doing.

No patriotic duty

Speaking of which, what clearer indication could there be of the investment world’s negative view of the London stock market than the news that BT’s pension fund – at £39 billion the largest of any FTSE 100 company – now holds just £100 million worth of UK-listed shares. But how surprising that the pensions specialist Baroness Altmann should call that choice by the fund’s managers ‘an outrage’, claiming that if a major fund such as BT’s fails to support its own economy, ‘your members are going to have a poorer retirement because they’ll be living in a poorer country.’

Individual pension funds are under no patriotic obligation to hold shares in their home territory. Their core duty and challenge is to provide pensions for the foreseeable future as the fruit of safe and growing global asset portfolios. The BT fund, like many others, has a limited appetite for listed equities of any nationality, holding less than £2 billion worth in total. It prefers to keep the UK segment of its pie-chart in the government stock, corporate bonds and property with which London fund managers are traditionally more comfortable.

Yes, as I’ve been writing lately, it’s a good idea that such funds might each contribute small slices to ‘superfunds’ that would invest long-term to build a stronger UK economy. But BT’s micro-shareholding in the UK is a symptom, not a cause, of a malaise of weak government, over-regulation, damaged trade and diminished business confidence, all fuelling a consensus of pessimism which turns out to be my theme for this week. In short, don’t blame the pension managers.

Braveheart Logan

Logan Roy is my new hero – and not just because my grizzled goatee (absent from the caricature above) and habitual growl make me a near double for Brian Cox who played the irascible Scottish-born media tycoon in Succession, of which I’ve at last caught the final series. Had he not expired in an aircraft toilet in episode three, I’m convinced the old brute would have seen off the creepy Swedish tech-bro takeover bidder Lucas Madsen as well as his own inadequate offspring and slimeball son-in-law. If I were Rupert Murdoch, I’d be proud to have such a braveheart corporate warrior modelled on me. And if I were the ghost of Sumner Redstone – a Murdoch-rival US media emperor as the owner of CBS, Viacom and Paramount, who refused to cede power to his children or anyone else until he was finally declared non compos mentis in his nineties – I’d be insanely jealous.

Fly on the tablecloth

If I had the satirical talent of Succession’s writer, Jesse Armstrong, I’d attempt a fly-on-the-tablecloth dramatisation of last week’s encounter in Paris between Bernard Arnault, French founder of the LVMH luxury goods group, and Elon Musk of Tesla and Twitter – who surely have nothing in common except rivalry for the title of world’s richest person, both currently at around £180 billion.

Musk is a tech obsessive who might be happier doing tequila shots with Lucas Madsen and once told an interviewer: ‘If there was a way that I could not eat so I could work more, I would not eat.’ Arnault is a classical pianist and art collector who owns Château Cheval Blanc in Saint-Émilion and Château d’Yquem in Sauternes – and if he chose the vintages for their masters-of-the-universe lunch, I only hope Musk didn’t dilute his wine with Coca-Cola.