kicked snug together

I received one of those emails from HM Treasury today explaining that the Lloyds Bank retail share sale was off. That's another of the Osborne agenda items biting the dust.

I must admit to buying a few shares around the time of the original Osborne announcement. After all, Lloyds were quite low-priced at the time and the now defunct Osborne statement implied that they would add about 20% to their value.

The revised Hammond plan is to quietly sell off the shares via Morgan Stanley to larger organisations. Re-privitisation by stealth. I suppose it keeps the potential gains in the hands of the institutional investors.

At the time of the Osborne announcement, 73.6p was the point at which to sell to make a profit for a retail sell-off. My oops diagram below shows that it has slipped somewhat from that point, this afternoon at around 51p.

Philip Hammond's revised calculation conveniently makes the necessary selling point around early today's 53p, to be sure of breaking even at £20.3bn after all the shares have been passed back into the private sector. In effect it bundles prior sell-off gains into the equation to make a break-even point.

The currently achieved £16.9bn needs just another £3.4bn to get back to the original figure. It's like Hammond giving away £1.34bn compared with Osborne's statement.

This revision gives the Chancellor something to talk about at the IMF.

For me, I'll hang on to my low-priced Lloyds shares, take the dividends and predict that the 53p price is really much undervalued for this equity.

"Kicked snug together, precious home solutions. Excited breathe confident calm breeze."

As the branding agency might say.