It’s been life assurance week in London. You probably noticed. Three of the leaders in this opaque business, with £2.2tn (that’s £2,200,000,000,000) of our money to play with, reported to the market. Sadly for two of them, the reports are not a pretty sight. However well they did for the holders of their funds under management (mostly, not particularly well) the companies’ shareholders have had a miserable time for many years.

So let’s start with Standard Life Aberdeen, with £540bn of savers’ money. The newish CEO, Stephen (“got the”) Bird seems to be pursuing a philosophy of “Beatings will continue until morale improves”. In January he told the staff to forget any thoughts of a bonus, and this week he slashed the dividend by a third, promising not to raise it again until SLA can generate a bit more capital from the business. Considering that the old Standard Life dividend had really looked “sustainable”, in the modern argot, the admission that it has fallen prey to incompetent management is another nasty blow. The shares now cost the same as they did a decade ago. At 294p they yield (a very fixed) 5 per cent.

Next up, our old pals at Aviva. This dinosaur of a business is struggling to make money from £366bn under management. The operating profit on this vast haul last year was just £85m, and once again at the annual meeting the management will be invited to explain what’s in it for the shareholders. The accompanying annual report continues the Aviva tradition of pages of nauseating platitudes, smiley happy people and enthusiasm for the fashionable aim of contributing net zero carbon. The dividend is up! Well, yes it is, but only compared with 2019, when under “guidance from regulators” the final dividend was scrapped. Not my fault, guv, implies the chairman, a smiley George Culmer. There’s been plenty of activity from his new CEO, a smiley Amanda Blanc, who has been the whirlwind of activity she promised, and the share price is now back up to 390p, the level it was a decade ago.

Our third example is Legal & General, with £1.3tn of our funds under its belt. It has the rare distinction of resisting pressure from the authorities during the great panic of last March, and paying an unchanged dividend. It’s unchanged again, but for us shareholders and those who can understand life assurance accounts, it looks sustainable (that word again). In the last decade the shares have risen from 117p to 281p according to Morningstar. The contrast with the other two is embarrassing.

Aviva and SLA go a long way to explaining why the FTSE100 has had such a miserable decade, and been such an easy benchmark to beat in recent years. Add in the banks, where profits (and dividends) are at the whim of central bankers, and the oils, where management hubris has met climate hysteria, and underperformance was almost guaranteed. Still, we are always being told that past performance is no guide to the future. We can only hope so.

Fix your mortgage for 40 years?

The idea of a long-term fixed-rate mortgage has always been attractive. No more fretting about where interest rates may go next; as long as you keep paying the same amount every month, you are fireproof, even if the value of your house goes down for a decade or two. The idea has recently become attractive enough to warrant official encouragement, and with long-term bond yields at today’s price it makes more sense than ever.

The problem is that lending for 40 years is not really a banking transaction, since the bank’s funds are effectively short-term deposits. This lending is far more suitable for life and pension funds, to provide assets against their long-term liabilities, but they are wary of getting into consumer products where they must assess the credit-worthiness of the borrower.

There are some signs that this may be changing, but painfully slowly. Habito, a mortgage broker, is offering 40-year fixed mortgages, but is unlikely to be killed in the rush. For a buyer putting up 60 per cent of the property cost, the fixed rate is 4.2 per cent. For the buyer looking for a 90 per cent mortgage, the rate goes up to 5.35 per cent. This is pretty expensive money by today’s standards, and reflects the lack of proper competition. No amount of competition will bring the rate down to the 1.25 per cent the UK government pays, but there is plenty of margin for big, long-term lenders to get stuck into this vital market.

Red, or at least pink, hot topic

You thought cryptocurrencies were disruptive? asked the FT this week. The paper is always keen to hear from its readers, or so it tells us, but in this case the question was strictly rhetorical. Those wanting to answer it were unable to do so, as a line at the foot of the piece read: This article is closed to comments due to a history of posts on this subject that breach FT user guidelines.

Perhaps this is just a sensible precaution, since bitcoin arouses even more passion than R.v Megan, dividing those who see cryptocurrencies as a means of escaping the tyranny of fiat money from those who see a godsend for drug dealers and arms traders. Since it can’t be uninvented, and Jo Biden is telling the US treasury to print money like never before, this one will run and run. Pity about the suppression of FT readers’ views, though.

ESG update

Quick: name the five highest rated companies in the FT100 by Environmental, Social and Governance scores. Bet you can’t, unless you have read the latest missive from Hargreaves Landown. The investment company’s top two are no surprise. Astra Zeneca and GlaxoSmithKline are no longer big bad pharma, but saviours of the nation from permanent lockdown. Number three, would you believe it, is British American Tobacco, because it cares for its farmer producers and tries to prevent employment of child labour. Number four is also something of an eyebrow-raiser. Glencore is a rough, tough mining company, but it is trying to live down its past by encouraging more sensitive behaviour from middle executives. Finally, here’s Coca Cola HBC, Coke’s European bottler, which says it doesn’t like all those discarded bottles and cans any more than you do, and is trying to mend its ways to make less waste. But still, don’t forget to brush your teeth – and take ESG with a mouthwash of scepticism.