Quantitative easing has served only to boost a banking sector yet to be cleaned up, leading fund manager Bruce Stout said yesterday as his £1.1 billion Murray International investment trust unveiled another strong performance.

"The M4 broad measure of money and credit in circulation is negative since 2009, all the QE has disappeared into recapitalising the banks and none of it has gone into the real economy," Mr Stout said.

He added that banking scandals did not seem to have abated, and he was disappointed to see one of the trust's holdings, Standard Chartered, mired in controversy.

"What we have to do is speak to the company and try to get a clear understanding of what is involved and what the implications are.

"It brings out the issue of opaqueness in the banking sector – you would have thought that after the events of 2008-09 there would be transparency but obviously there isn't."

But the 106-year-old trust managed for Aberdeen Asset Management by Mr Stout since 2004 continues to satisfy its 20,000-plus private shareholders, as it sustains a yield of around 4% from its global portfolio targeting both growth and income.

In the first half of 2012 it has delivered a 6.1% total return per share against 4.2% for the benchmark, supporting another 12.5% increase in the dividend.

The shares rose by 9.6% in the period, and currently trade at a 6% premium to asset value, which Mr Stout admits is "not ideal". Murray International has turned £1000 into £1106 over one year, £1673 over three years and £1881 over five years, according to Lipper figures for Investment Life & Pensions Moneyfacts, well ahead of Scotland's best-performing global growth trusts, and beaten only (over one and three years) by Martin Currie's Securities Trust for Scotland.

Mr Stout, who earlier this year told a conference that Western economies faced a lost decade ahead, warned that the UK's trade deficit was at its highest level in 60 years, yet interest rates were at their lowest.

Foreign investors could not be relied on to sustain borrowings when a country was living beyond its means, he added.

"Economic policy in the UK is trying to sue the credit cycle to reignite growth in exactly the same way it has done for the last 40 years, but the new illness in the economy won't respond to the old measures."

The manager said: "We have been defensively positioned since 2010 and remain very much in capital preservation mode." In 2012 he had been "doing nothing", except issuing £52 million of new shares to control the premium, and topping up existing holdings such as ENI, Total and Petrobras when the oil price sank to $75.

Mr Stout said: "Every time you do a transaction you cost your shareholders money, so unless there are valuation discrepancies then often the best action is no action – you shouldn't do things for the sake of doing them."

He said perceptions of growth and deficit reduction were driving market sentiment, along with the ECB's promise to do whatever is needed – "what that means nobody knows", he added.

The trust would not be moving to make new investments until there was "a bit more gloom and despair" in the market, reducing valuations, Mr Stout said.

He questioned why anyone should want to invest in German or Swiss bonds which guaranteed a real loss of capital, or in a corporate bond paying under 1% when the equity of the same company was yielding over 7%, as with Zurich. These were "extremely baffling trades", he said.