Rachael McKelvey

• Dormant accounts scheme pays out
• My international Women’s Day
• Do you want to live to 100?
• What bird flu means to me
• What’s going on with SVB?

Dormant Asset Scheme Pay-out
Under the Dormant Assets Scheme £76 million from dormant accounts are to be released by HRMC this week to support people with the costs of living. The money is being distributed to individuals to support getting out of debt and to social enterprise schemes to support energy saving solutions.

The main aim of the dormant assets scheme is to reunite people with lost funds, however it’s not always possible and so is transferred to the scheme to support good causes, currently limited by legislation to youth, financial inclusion, and social investment initiatives.

Currently the schemes reach is only forgotten bank accounts and building society accounts, but its remit is being extended out to include insurances, pensions and even wealth management and securities which is likely to generate £880 million into the scheme.

The scheme is an interesting one and only funds from signed up banks and building societies are eligible to the fund after the business has failed to make best efforts to find the owner. Should an owner resurface years later, the scheme is liable for the value of the funds at the time it was transferred to the scheme as it is still the legal property of the owner but I think the idea is a good one, if reasonable efforts are made and for whatever reason the owner can’t be found then using the funds to support societal improvement seems the next best thing to be done!

International Women’s Day
I did not have the best International Women’s Day, I was low key annoyed from within an hour of getting up…it was snowing (the good stuff, not the slush this week has turned into) & I love walking in the snow. I made the decision not to wear my coat and just go out in a hoodie and leggings, the cold doesn’t bother me anyway and I do a figure 8 loop round where I live on the first loop I say good morning to a guy using a broom to clear snow off his truck, on the second loop I encounter the same man who has driven to the shop who acknowledges me again and makes a comment and the comment was nothing, it wasn’t rude or impolite, it’s just he wouldn’t have said it if I was a man.

I then foolishly requested a repeat prescription from GP surgery, which then lead to my GP ringing and then texting me about my blood pressure (which is fine btw), which then lead to a phone call and being told after THREE YEARS of my blood work coming back “in the normal range” that its “not the optimal range” & that I need to keep a record of my results and aim for the number to be in the optimal range, like I haven’t spent the last three years getting private blood tests done to prove exactly this point to him to finally get the medication I need to keep me alive.

I love that IWD show cases women, but what I really think IWD should be is looking at the systems and structures that continue to support suppressing women. I don’t want to be resilient or inspirational or brave…I want the glaring holes in systems and structures and data about women acknowledged and actions taken to address those and I know it won’t make an ounce of difference in my lifetime but it will to future women and that is what it’s all about.

Do you want to live to 100?
This week I learnt that todays 5 years old born in the wealthiest countries will likely live to 100…using the phrase 80 will be the new 60. The article from National Geographic is as exciting as it is horrifying…but I am not currently 5 years old and I can’t imagine growing up with the things children have available to them today so some things I’m just not keen because they just feel so alien to me, but they won’t to 5 year old Peggy because the future is now.

I think probably what really got me thinking is just how much technology will step in and do the thing’s we really should be doing for ourselves “a bionic exoskeleton to ease her muscles in later life”, and the key to  “…longevity is to slow down, stay healthy, and spend time with the people that matter” and strong agree. Laying those foundations now is so so important, I hope society can make the move to those chances for our current 5 year olds, our generations have sort of got lost in the middle working bit, where we will just have to go that harder for longer and if we can retire then it might not be as luxurious as those before us.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I do not want to live to 100 in our current political and social state, and fortunately the genetics in my family are not stacked in my favour on that front, bar a decent set of outliers on my mums side, the exception that prove that rule!

What bird flu means to me
I listened to the Guardians Today in Focus Podcast about Avian Flu, listening to Harriet Reed talk about her life as a ranger on the Farne Islands with the birds and the seals but how in recent months, that has all changed with a new strain of bird flu, the odd dead bird turned into a mass extraction of 6000 carcasses and it just really got me thinking about how much hen keeping as changed.

This got me thinking about what bird flu has meant to me, this week I made a small snow man for my chickens so they can enjoy the snow. By the time it got to them it was ice rather than snow, but they enjoyed pecking at it just like they would if they were free to roam in the snow. I’ve kept chickens for well over a decade and in that time hen keeping has changed a lot but in recent years since bird flu it’s hard.

Long gone are the days of them roaming the garden of and evening or a weekend, they are under cover at all times to stop any passing droppings potentially contaminating our flock. They’ve also had mixed health care when we’ve needed to have them looked at because rightfully Vet’s don’t want them on premises in case they are infected, because the reality it that it has spread, to sea birds and mammals. There have also been deaths in humans who have worked closely with birds.

Our current flock have never known a free range life, they’ve never run around our garden or stood at the bottom of the fork waiting for worms to appear. It makes me sad there is a whole life they’ve not lived, but they live a full and rich life with more garden than ever, more enrichment activities than we’ve ever provided before and it’s a small price to pay to not lose them to an awful disease.

What’s going on with SVB?
Is it a symptom of the market or a tale as old as time?

Well-funded startsups meet attractive looking bank (SVB) and decide to deposit their excess funds, SVB lends out said deposits in a questionable financial decision (typically one asset class on money also loaned by one customer class) and buys safe 10-year bonds and mortgage backed securities to make moderately low yield. The macro environment changed, and the well-funded startups start needing their money back to survive.

The Fed enters the chat and raises interest rates leaving those 10-year bonds and securities losing money…so how exactly do you raise money to pay out on accounts that you’ve tied up for 10 years losing money? You sell securities which have also lost value in the interest hike and/or you have to start raising funds.

SVB sold $20bn of bonds and took a £2bn loss on that and this signalled to the market they were so desperate for cold hard cash they took a loss of £2bn just to get liquidity, which also isn’t a strong indicator to your customers, who then rightly might think their money is best off elsewhere, which then compounds the liquidity problem in a bit of a vicious circle.

More withdrawals, more strain on liquidity, more strain on liquidity, more withdrawals.

And that is the simple story of how a sudden bank run and capital crisis can leave you taken over by federal regulators and the largest failing US bank since 2008, the ripple out from this is anyone’s guess.

Current watch:  Carnival Row – Another excellent series I did not realise was back for another series…described as a Victorian “neo-noir fantasy” Carnival Row stars Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevinge and follows the plight of mythical creatures having fled their homes as a result of war to a new city where the tensions grow between citizens and its growing immigrant population. There is a love story within the twisty who done it fairy tale and its beautifully shot and is oddly reminiscent of other cult classics.

Current read: Unashamed – Harry Baker – I want to read a little bit more poetry this year, it’s writing I struggle with (unsure if it’s the aphantasia or I just don’t like it) so there was no better place to start than a Maths graduate and World Poetry Slam champion Harry Baker, he wrote a love poem about prime numbers. Unashamed is the collection of poetry he wrote during the pandemic and some of the poems he had taken on his world tour that abruptly came to an end. What a lovely collection of poetry and personal prose in between but my favourite bit was the numbers around a marathon and as someone who did run maths the entire time through her most successful marathon it was lovely to see I wasn’t the only one.

Most Impactful Listen: FT Money Clinic – How to financially survive divorce – Divorce inquiries are always busy in the first half of the year and it was oddly refreshing to see this title pop up in my feed. I have never been married but I have been in a situation where I felt a marriage certificate would have just been another piece of paper that would need paying to dissolve in order to extricate myself from the human being I was with at the time. The guests talk openly and honestly about their situations and the questions they had wished to know the answers to in hindsight and the experts are as helpful as they can be in short form generalities. This podcast is just as useful for anyone who has financially linked themselves to a partnership and wanted to leave as it is if you are also married.