YABA New Year Drinks Reception
Not your usual YABA event, this January 19th saw Yorkshire Association of Business Angels deliver a New Year Drinks Reception with guest speaker Mark Wallace, Investment Director of Rothschild Private Management who spoke about The Great Reflation. The gathering was kindly hosted by Eversheds Solicitors at their Bridgewater Place office, overlooking the city of Leeds.
The event got underway with attendees being served the Barons de Rothschild’s (Lafite) wine before coming together to listen to YABA’s Chairman Andrew Burton welcome the first presenter to the fore, Nick Barran. Nick is Client Director of Rothschild and gave a concise history of the company which was established almost 200 years ago and has been at the forefront of finance throughout the world since then. It has an illustrious history having seen investments in Wellington’s army and the Suez Canal amongst others. It now has forty offices in thirty three countries and is still owned by the Rothschild family.
Nick then handed over to Mark Wallace who was delighted to be invited out and stated that it doesn’t happen often when you work in the banking world! Mark’s talk on The Great Reflation began with Grace Groner’s story – a lady who was exceptionally restrained with money but who decided in 1935 to invest $180 in a company called Abbott Laboratories, which deals with global healthcare and medical research. After her death 75 years later the executors of her estate were shocked to see that her original stock purchase was now worth over £7m. Mark’s presentation gave a history of UK inflation since 1750 and showed the figures for the Governments current official net debt which, if it were divided between the UK’s individuals equated to a debt of £70,000 each.
The advice given to preserve wealth is to invest in international currencies, in gold and other commodities and in high quality businesses - which is exactly where angel networks like YABA are able to assist in finding potential investment opportunities for its members.
The presentations themselves concluded with YABA’s Director and founder member Peter Ball thanking all those who were involved in putting together the evening’s event. He finished with a quote from Cicero from 55BC: “The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” Not much changes!!
