Elegant, high-quality investments anyone?

In these troubled times, what would investors' appetite be for a vehicle that provided a guaranteed income stream, a principal guarantee over the life of the product, a broad choice of life to match investors' preferred time horizons and an opportunity for capital gains independent of the stock market? What I have described are some of the characteristics of that particularly unfashionable instrument known as the gilt. In the current environment of, at best, volatile and, at worst, capital-destroying equity markets, a renewed focus on lower-risk investments should hardly come as a surpr...