Eddie Hobbs, Managing Director“My company has always been strongly associated with acting as an agent of the consumer rather than the asset manager and, keeping them keen and competitive is the key” says Hobbs, managing director at Hobbs Financial Practice.
A person of action, Hobbs initially collapsed the Irish endowment mortgage marketplace in 1993 and later played a pivotal role in introducing consumer transparency and disclosure law across Ireland in 2001 after winning a case issued under competition law against the collective life insurance industry. That victory meant the government passed laws that made it mandatory to disclose commissions and charges on retail investment products and eventually brought all financial regulation under the central bank’s control. In 2005 he designed and presented RTE’s blockbuster Rip Off Republic, four-hour-long polemics on how Ireland was run by vested interests, that set audience records for factual TV and, within weeks resulted in the repeal of a price-setting law in the grocery marketplace since 1987.
Within weeks of the pandemic lockdowns, in April 2020, when deflation beckoned, writing a substantial analysis in the Irish Examiner, he predicted that excessive money printing would result in a long-term sticky inflation climate and that some sovereigns with dollar-denominated debt would run aground. He took to radio ads to drive threat to cash depositors to a national audience. He’s also been ‘quietly focused’, as he puts it, in uncovering serious issues in the selling of unregulated and non-transparent loan notes which are debt instruments to unquoted companies that he believes threaten to create hundreds of millions of Euros in potential losses.
To stay ahead of the curve during these challenging times, Hobbs advises his clients to come to terms with the beginning of a new financial cycle and to bid farewell to groupthink products manufactured during the great moderation of inflation from the 80’s.
Having witnessed many global financial crises, Hobbs believes the best way to stay relevant to clients is to boost communication over periods of great uncertainty with clear-headed assessment.
Predicting an unusual year in 2023 in terms of capital investment, Hobbs Financial Practice suggests investing in cash and gold and waiting until better opportunities present themselves. He thinks risks to earnings will replace inflation as the bogeyman this year, opening troughs for those awaiting better value and maintains a special focus on investment in properties with 25 year Government guaranteed inf lation-linked leases.
In addition, Hobbs Financial Practice helps investigate knotty issues and recover funds misused by banks and asset management firms. In one case, an American client approached Hobbs to help find details of investments made by a bank’s investment arm on her Irish grandmother’s behalf.
Finding her up against a wall of obfuscation, his first course of action was to try to gain access to full discovery on the investment file. Hobbs arranged to have the client’s father broadcast their dilemma on the radio as the bank had not budged from its stand. The message was powerful, and the bank released the entire file within days. In possession of the file, Hobbs carefully aligned the documents in chronological order. The first issue was the date the bank recorded their client advisory meeting.
My company has always been strongly associated with acting as an agent of the consumer rather than the asset manager or financial institution
Hobbs emailed the Director of Compliance of the bank with a copy of the Ballincollig Parishioner and referred him to Prayers of the Faithful on the front cover. The date of the advisory meeting was a Sunday, a day when no Irish bank is open. The second issue he pointed to was that the bank was reporting the first telepathic telegraphic movement of money in banking history, since the client’s money left the bank weeks before the advisory meeting took place. The third issue was that the bank claimed that the three investments arranged, including ten-year bonds were appropriate because they denied the money was that of the ninety year old Granny but instead was invested by her daughter, then in her 60’s. When the bank eventually assigned a Director to meet Hobbs, he refused to meet at bank HQ but instead met in a dimly lit pub. After the Director repeated the bank’s line, Hobbs pulled out an instruction from the Granny. It was on bank headed notepaper. The money was returned in full within two weeks.
Constantly on the move to learn and understand the investment options market, Hobbs questions fintech and proposed regulation, including on Employer pension schemes to ensure it benefits consumers and doesn’t maroon them from human advice. The financial and investment advisor works with many clients including employers to understand them, designing carefully curated solutions that fit the job in hand.
