Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer: How many times must we save the City?

Plus: How much money you need to be happy, and when risk-taking is the safest thing

Top of my Christmas reading pile is Saving the City by Richard Roberts, a new account of the largely forgotten crisis which afflicted global markets at the outbreak of the first world war, forcing the London Stock Exchange to close on Friday 31 July 1914 and stay dark for six months. It’s a reminder of how often in modern times the City has had to be ‘saved’ — including May 1866 when Overend & Gurney collapsed, November 1890 when ‘Nemesis overtook Croesus’ in the first Baring crisis, and of course the bailouts of October 2008. It’s also a reminder of another book on my shelf, subtitled The Night the City Was Saved. That one, The Cedar Story by Charles Gordon, is an account of the dramas of 19 December 1973 — 40 years ago this week — when a Who’s Who of the City was summoned to the Bank of England to prevent a crippled ‘fringe bank’ called Cedar Holdings from provoking a domino collapse across the financial sector.

Presided over by Governor Gordon Richardson and his deputy Jasper Hollom (still with us at 96), the 17-hour conclave involved the directors of Cedar, representatives of its major shareholders, and a team from Barclays, the bank most exposed to Cedar. No one leaves until a rescue is sealed, commanded the governor, and tempers soon began to fray. Cob Stenham, representing Unilever’s pension fund, barked at -Hollom not to treat him like a clerk when Hollom threatened to go over his head for a decision. One of the Barclays men was my father, who was afterwards secretly proud of having picked a fight with the chairman of Phoenix Assurance, Viscount de l’Isle VC.

The investors and bankers at last agreed terms through gritted teeth, but the Cedar directors refused to sign — until the alternative was presented to them in the person of Sir Kenneth Cork, the City’s most feared and famous liquidator.

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