British pension savers will benefit from Donald Trump’s election, the head of a major retirement business has said.
Andrew Evans, group chief executive of Smart Pension, said Mr Trump would boost stock markets, yielding returns for pension funds that have money in US assets.
Mr Evans said: “Certainly American markets in the past few days since the Trump victory have been incredibly bullish and that will benefit a lot of people with pensions in the UK who have got money deployed in American assets, whether they know it or not.”
Smart Pension, which looks after 1.4m savers, has 52pc of its main fund invested in the US.
US stock markets jumped in the wake of the election result as markets bet that Mr Trump, who had promised to make sweeping corporate tax cuts, would be good for business.
The S&P 500 rose by 5pc in the days following the election to hit a record high of 6001.35 points. It has since fallen to 5,863.69 points but this is still 2.6pc higher than the day before the election and up by 12.8pc since Aug.
The Nasdaq Composite Index similarly soared to a record high in the days after the election result and is still up 2.6pc compared to Nov 4.
Stocks have rallied despite widespread warnings from economists that Mr Trump’s campaign promise to introduce large, blanket trade tariffs will wreak economic havoc around the world and drive up inflation.
Mr Evans said: “[Trump’s] policies are going to promote American growth and, therefore, a lot of assets within American companies, so that actually does benefit global pension funds.”
Smart Pension is the UK’s fastest growing master trust – a pension scheme for multiple employers – and has more than £6bn of assets under management.
Rachel Reeves last week laid out plans to overhaul workplace pensions and release £80bn in investment by pooling pots to create “megafunds”, giving them the firepower to invest in a broader range of assets.
Mr Evans welcomed the plan which he said fit “extremely well with our own mission to transform retirement saving” Smart Pension invests 6pc of its master fund in private markets and plans to do more, he added.
However, he said that the Government needed to do more to incentivise investment in the UK, following the Chancellor’s Budget, which included £41.5bn in tax rises.
“You can try and promote growth but you’ve got more than £40bn in additional taxes, so it’s going to be difficult to balance that unless you bring other structures out,” Mr Evans said.