Weekending 31 July

Conservative leadership contest

Things are looking bad for Rishi. The master of detail and the straight-A student has failed to learn that to get elected you must promise the undeliverable. Truss, who has on several occasions embraced policies that even Milton Friedman would have approved of, understood first that you have to promise stuff you know will be undeliverable, or deliverable but terrible for the economy. Policy promises come thick and fast, but the one which is most depressing to me is the promise to worship at the altar of the Great Green Belt Goddess.

Throttling development around the most productive cities in the UK is one of the economically damaging policies that are current. And don’t get me started on wider planning policy that expropriated development rights from landowners and handed them to (of all people!) local councils. Local councils, who the parliamentary party hates, whether or not they are Conservative controlled. A disaster, but supposedly one favoured by the Rotary Club brigade.

Ranpack ($PACK)

Overlooked Alpha put out a buy recommendation on this stock, here. It’s a lockdown winner that has had a torrid time recently, but it sells boring stuff (a paper-based alternative to bubblewrap) and seems to be a leader in its field, selling to the likes of Amazon. It has quite a bit of debt, which seems quite expensive, and has had some terrible execution of strategy recently, but might just make it. It’s trading at below book value, and at about 10 times EBITDA.

I think it’s worth watching, especially after its share price crashed last week.