What a week! FTSE dipped below 5000, aggresive bears prowl the Street, and we move inexorably to Defense Condition 1.

It strikes me as ironic, however, that whilst there is, understandably, huge focus on pension funds losing serious money in Act of God times like these – per the Daily Mail (as always) “stocks plummet”, “market crashes”, “pension funds lose billions” – there is very much less awareness that equal havoc is wrought by deliberate man-made disasters such as switching the benefit indexation link from CPI to RPI or edit replacing “final salary” with “career average”…