I once asked an American friend to come and talk to the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation. He told them that he was against it. That put him ahead of his time, but Mervyn King agrees with him. In his decade as Governor of the Bank of England, he had seen what innovation
In Germany in 1923 money was losing its value so fast that the state printing works could not keep up. The work had to be contracted out to 130 different printing firms, all churning out marks with the lifespan of mayflies. Only ten years earlier, the mark had been as good as gold. Then Germany
As the world braces itself for the inevitable Greek default, and investors look nervously at potentially exposed banks, perhaps it’s worth recalling Argentina’s implosion a decade ago. Here is what the Spectator made of it at the time: The missionary Bishop Heber wrote a hymn about Ceylon: ‘Where every prospect pleases And only man is vile.’
Unhappy anniversary. Ten years ago the Chancellor of the day was congratulating himself audibly on a job well done, and in the vaults of the Bank of England grumpy porters were sticking labels on the ingots to indicate a change of ownership. This was Gordon Brown’s great clearance sale. He had chosen to auction more
The best moment in a chancellor’s life comes early. ‘Mr Deputy Speaker,’ he says, ‘we have examined the books. The position is grave. My first duty is to put the public finances in order.’ He then sends for the Hungarian middle-distance runner, Savij Kutz. This bogeyman, first identified by Alan Watkins, has been off the
My racing correspondent, Captain Threadneedle, thought that banking and racing went together. He wanted Barclays to buy the Tote: perfect synergy, he thought, with matching systems, merged accounts, an overlapping customer base and a marketing slogan that would write itself: ‘You can bet on your overdraft with Barclays.’ He was, as we now know, before
The Treasury thought the railways were in terminal decline. John Major’s government thought they were a political nuisance — vexed commuters meant lost voters. Privatisation would get the railways off the government’s back, and breaking them into 100 pieces would mean that if one piece was on strike, the other 99 would not be. In
Oh, dear, what a setback. The usual suspects have slipped through the net. They will have to be locked up in the Financial Services Authority’s waterside fortress for 42 days, while the investigators try again to find some evidence. These suspects are the short sellers: everyone’s favourite scapegoat. They are accused of rocking the banks’
Christopher Fildes on international accounting standards How gratifying. One set of rules for the whole world, and all of them springing from a fountainhead in Cannon Street, London EC4. There will have been no such display of global authority since the sun set on the British empire. Washington is warming to it. Brussels is restive.
Christopher Fildes on the business dealings at Newbury Forget Cheltenham. That was just a warm-up. The big meeting next week is at Newbury, and it will have everything — fierce contests and driving finishes and bitter objections and stewards’ inquiries and prize-money running well into eight figures — everything, that is, except horses. Trooping into Newbury
My friend Herbie from the Last National Bank of Boot Hill understood about rogue traders. When another hapless bank owned up to losses ‘due to unauthorised trading’, he added: ‘They mean nobody authorised the guy to get it wrong.’ Now that a French trader called Jerome Kerviel has set a new record by losing £3.6
The old ones are the best, so allow me to remind you of Sibley’s Law. Giving capital to a bank (said that worldly banker, Nicholas Sibley) is like giving a gallon of beer to a drunk. You know what will become of it, but you can’t know which wall he will choose. By now we
25 October 1986 My friend the stockjobber closed his book, turned his back on his pitch, and walked with me off the Stock Exchange floor, down Throgmorton Street and into Bill Bentley’s fish house. We raised our glasses of Montrachet to the last of the good old days. On Monday he must quit the floor
A health warning greeted me: ‘LIBEL. Mr Christopher Fildes and Mr Auberon Waugh have today joined the staff of The Spectator. As from today, The Spectator is no longer insured against libel. Gatley’s Libel and Slander (sixth and seventh edition) may be consulted in my office. Nigel Lawson, Editor.’ Times were hard. I had come
A sprig of the Pilkington family was saying goodbye to his hosts. ‘I’ve an early start,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got to be at the bloody glassworks in the morning.’ When he arrived, he found that the chairman, Sir Harry Pilkington, was there before him and had left a note on his desk: ‘My boy, it
Asked what he did in the French Revolution, the Abbé Sieyes explained that he survived it. Against all the odds, this has been the London Stock Exchange’s achievement. It is still there. Its dreary old building looks better as a hole in the ground, but the Exchange has found itself a new perch in Paternoster
This week’s message from the Confederation of British Industry: we’ll just die and then you’ll be sorry. I take this as more of a threat than a promise, but since it is all about pensions, anything is possible. Many (perhaps most) of the CBI’s member companies must now be stuck with underfunded pension schemes, the
Tutti possono sbagliare: we can all make mistakes, as the hedgehog observed, getting down from the hearth-brush. Whether our prickly Chancellor is a student of Italian proverbs, I cannot say, but he could learn from this one. In the five and half years since he auctioned half the nation’s gold reserves, the price of gold
This is the time of year for virtuous resolutions, so let us resolve on a visit to the Bad Investment Guide, which now has a gilt-edged new entry. In among all the flaky oil-drillers and flats brought off the drawing board for a quick turn, we can note the stately presence of Her Majesty’s Government’s
Gordon Brown is a son of the manse, so he will have been brought up on the Parable of the Unjust Steward. As stewards have been known to do, this one, we are told, had been fiddling the figures, and realised that his accounts would soon be audited. When that day came, he knew, he