KEY POINTS:
The fashion in finance is to refer to the rich as 'high net worth individuals'. I'm not sure why 'rich', or even the slightly more genteel word 'wealthy', have fallen out of favour in the world of money - maybe they are too confrontational, too emotionally-loaded, for use in the purposefully sterile language adopted in the press releases and research documents that ping into my inbox.
ING, for example, kept to industry best practice in the release trumpeting its Investor Sentiment Dashboard Survey. According to the ING study, New Zealand's "high net worth investors recorded a 35 per cent drop in confidence during the last quarter of 2008".
There is nothing surprising in the ING survey and little, if any, practical benefit in it for the average punter. The most you could say about the survey is that it describes the obvious in numbers.
And sometimes in words. ING spokesman, Steven Giannoulis, confirms in the release that New Zealand investors have been hurt by the credit crunch and are "taking a more cautious and conservative approach to investment".
"It appears that globally we are more dependent on one another than we thought we were, we are not isolated from global financial events," Giannoulis says. Is this a nod towards ING's own, recent painful lesson in the perils of globalisation? An attempt to establish empathy with the thousands of investors burnt by ING's frozen CDO funds?
I don't think so. The Australian arm of global fund manager and consultancy firm, Russell, does empathy so much better in this upbeat little report issued recently, where it states "we are extremely aware that our investors are frustrated and fearful, and we share your pain".
ING is probably sharing the pain too (although it hasn't said so) but as one reader of Good Returns asked: "Is it a good idea to sponsor an 'investor confidence' survey when your company has frozen (and potentially, lost) $800 million-odd of investors' money?"
It's a bit rich.
David Chaplin
