Big bang: deregulation of the City of London

The Making of Global Capitalism

by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin  · 8 Oct 2012  · 823pp  · 206,070 words

legal, accounting, and consultancy firms also facilitated the making of global capitalism under the aegis of the American empire. This was further enhanced when the City of London switched its international allegiance from sterling to the dollar, and became by the 1960s the Eurodollar satellite of Wall Street. But, together with the appearance

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was more than ever subject to the gold standard in international finance, with the Bank of England’s management of gold-sterling exchanges and the City of London’s deep and liquid discount markets at its epicenter. Indeed, rigid commitment to the gold standard, which the American state now adopted as the

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an international medium of exchange, unit of account or store of value.”72 This was only partly a legacy of its past reliance on the City of London to finance foreign trade; it also reflected the long tradition of farmer populism that had blocked the creation of a central bank and the

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40 percent of the world’s gold reserves were in the Fed’s vaults and only 20 percent in the Bank of England’s, the City of London was still the linchpin of the international financial system. Together the central banks of the US and the UK sought to coordinate a modicum

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in the first majority Labour Government in history. Insofar as its nationalization of the Bank soon proved to have remarkably little effect in displacing the City of London from the center of capitalist power in Britain, this had something to do with the fact that the domestic balance of forces inside the US

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for their ideas.”36 And the Bank of England—even after its nationalization by the postwar Labour government—continued to represent the interests of the City of London, often in alliance with a Treasury increasingly obsessed with restraining union wage power under conditions of high employment.37 Meanwhile, the Bank of International

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it, and resistant to American pressures to join in European integration, proved more intractable—despite (or perhaps because of) the “special relationship.” Yet with the City of London pressing for the removal of currency controls in order to regain its place as a leading financial center, the way was being paved for the

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the internationalization of production remained very much a North American–European affair. Internationalizing Finance Another crucial moment in the transition to global capitalism was the City of London’s deeper integration into the American empire through the creation of the Eurodollar market. From the time that Keynes led the wartime Lend-Lease negotiations

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union leadership, this defense proved futile in the face of hostility from British bankers to any sort of planning and the growing openness of the City of London to international finance. This finally led, in late 1967, to the devaluation of the pound.52 In Germany, strikes under full-employment conditions heralded

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with the Communist Party. But from the perspective of the American state, perhaps the most disturbing development of all, given the key role of the City of London in global financial markets and sterling’s role as the de facto first line of defense for the dollar, was the British Labour Party’s

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system.”91 The Bank of England now offered, for the first time in its history, “formal and public instruction” to all banks operating in the City of London to “tighten up their internal control systems” on their branches’ foreign exchange operations; the US Treasury’s Comptroller of the Currency created a Multinational Banking

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had forced the government to seek a loan from the IMF. The relentless pressure that the US Treasury, as well as the banks in the City of London, now brought to bear on Britain to accept the severe conditions attached to the provision of funds must be understood in this context: getting a

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Economic Strategy. On taking office the government did not have to wait to be apprised by the governor of the Bank of England of the City of London’s monetarist views; their widespread coverage in the financial press meant that they were on the new ministers’ breakfast tables every morning. Inflation was

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penalties introduced in the 1960s to protect the dollar. At the same time, the US investment banks not only greatly expanded their operations in the City of London, but also spread out into the European continent, and beyond. In addition to underwriting the bonds that covered the growing indebtedness of US federal,

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after Salomon Brothers engineered the first major derivative bond swap between IBM and the World Bank in the early 1980s, J.P. Morgan used its City of London operations to circumvent the Glass-Steagall Act and allow its clients to take advantage of the explosion of derivatives markets. By the early 1990s, after

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innovation” at the center of the Euromarkets, was the leading site of this Americanization.19 The removal of UK capital controls in 1979, the City of London’s own “big bang” in 1987, and the new stock exchange system modeled on the automated NASDAQ in the US, were all about trying to compete with New

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director for global markets at an American bank in Hong Kong was quoted as saying: “We were all told, ‘Thou shalt not cut.’” A City of London banker put the whole operation in broader perspective: “The sad fact is that international banks never accomplish much unless they are pushed by the US

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Paper 199, Basel: Bank of International Settlements, 2006, p. 6. 92 See Catherine Schenk, “Crisis and Opportunity: The Policy Environment of International Banking in the City of London, 1958–1980,” in Cassis and Bussière, London and Paris, Oxford: OUP, 2005, p. 222; White, Comptroller, pp. 35–6; and Kapstein, Governing the Global

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the US. For this argument, and the quotation used here, see Ricardo Housmann and Federico Sturzenegger, “US and Global Imbalances: Can Dark Matter Prevent a Big Bang?” Working Paper, Kennedy School of Government, November 13, 2005. See also Herman Schwartz, Subprime Nation: American Power, American Capital and the Housing Bubble, Ithaca:

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, 373n,24 IMF loan to, 157–9, 371n9 UK Treasury, 76, 84–5, 118, 157–8, 282, 366–7n43, 482n37 See also Bank of England; City of London; sterling Brookings Institution, 382n43 Brown, Gordon, 316 Brown, Michael J., 361n70 Broz, J. Lawrence, 354n72 Bryan, Dick, 176 Bryan, John H, Jr., 228 Buiter,

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Chrysler, 61, 139, 167, 171, 189, 201, 207, 321 CIA, vii, 98, 104, 148, 216 Citibank, 437n35 Citicorp, 180, 260 Citigroup, 201, 306, 316, 439n56 City of London, 12, 36, 42, 51, 77, 97, 102, 117, 128, 143, 154, 157–8, 175–6, 199, 260, 380n18 Clark, T.D. 410n105 Clarke, Simon,

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443n2 Ferguson, Tom, 344n17, 352n43, 355n4, 359n48, 360n59 Fife, Gene, 200 finance, 6, 10, 15–6, 86, 129, 172, 177, 181, 333, 337 ‘big bang’ (US), 122, 149, 165 ‘big bang’ (UK), 199 Bretton Woods as cradle of, 10, 345n24 democratization of, 269–70 in developing world, 157, 285 expansion of US, 86, 119

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis

by David Boyle  · 15 Jan 2014  · 367pp  · 108,689 words

question at the heart of this book. Given that extraordinary shift in fortunes — and that cascade of money through property and financial services known as Big Bang — why is it that the middle classes feel so threatened? Why have they been sidelined by a new and aggressive international class of megarich?

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and the culprit — at least as much as anyone else — was Barclays, then known as Barclay, Bevan, Tritton, Ransom, Bouverie and Co., or in the City of London as the ‘long firm’. In 1896 they persuaded nine smaller banks to join them, mainly in the East and North, in a major enterprise to

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the UK economy. Mark Boléat is one of those economists and policymakers who everyone acknowledges are extremely clever. He is now effectively leader of the City of London Corporation, but he led the Building Societies Association through the revolutionary 1980s, having joined the organization almost straight from university in 1974. He was

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bank that was Barclays. It was said that Barclays’ chairman Andrew Buxton used to go out into the street outside his headquarters in the City of London and send away all the taxis waiting to take the brokers to lunch in the West End.[11] It was this outfit that was given

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Hypothesis on which everything else was based. It also provides a small part of the explanation for everything else that has gone wrong with the City of London, set out so graphically by the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, in 2011. Governors of the Bank of England are not

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world in which the state will bail them out on the downside profits. Had any Bank of England governor ever attacked the values of the City of London before? The City’s historian David Kynaston suggests not, and it was the long list of failings which were listed in his speech that was

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s financial district. It ridiculed their moral sense and their sense of responsibility. Unleashing the City — the knock-on effects of the event known as Big Bang — may have systematically destroyed the very values of the middle class it was supposed to support, leaving their future in doubt. The idea that

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by-product of the very British success story that put London back at the centre of the world financial system. Yet the author of the Big Bang reforms that caused it, Nicholas Goodison, was still able to describe the headquarters of his first stockbroker as ‘a grotty old office in the

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The Times compared him to a fox terrier, ‘small, fussy and persistent’. They also called him ‘the most powerful faceless bureaucrat we have’.[2] The City of London in those days was a peculiar place, well past its prime, still a hotchpotch of semi-medieval peculiarities, of which the man in the pink

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Exchange, as a preliminary to letting them own 100 per cent. This was to be the basis for the explosion of finance now known as Big Bang. Not everyone was impressed. ‘Sir Gordon Borrie … has every reason to resent the way that a government committed to free markets and untrammelled competition

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in broking, ushering in a corrosive and inflationary world of vast salaries and bonuses, and of Chinese walls inside institutions that in practice barely existed. Big Bang may have been inevitable, and some elements of it were a complete success, but the results have been extreme, and especially for the middle

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in Honduras or Bangladesh that make Disney shirts and bags. In 1980, people in finance still earned broadly the same as other industries. Even after Big Bang, the chief executives of the biggest UK banks earned seven times average household income. Now it is 230 times.[10] The banker John Pierpont

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After all, you cannot look a screen in the eye, can you?’[15] But they didn’t fight. How could they? The real stuff of Big Bang, the electronic trading screens, in the form of SEAC (Stock Exchange Automated Quotations), was agreed that July. Barclays led the field, testing the new terminals

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wrench them from their current management. The exchanges were beginning to boom. The FTSE 100 was launched at 1000 points in 1984. The weekend before Big Bang, it was already on 1577. Lawson fuelled the fire by halving stamp duty on share transactions. It was the start of the bonanza, in

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. Just disgraceful behaviour, money grabbing money. And that sort of sickness has endured actually.’ So, as the countdown moved towards the inevitable moment of Big Bang, there was increasing opposition from the sidelines. By April 1984, as the historic names of City stockbroking were disappearing in broad daylight, Goodison’s detailed

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not inevitable at all. For those who could peer dimly into the future, the signs were already there. One study published in the week of Big Bang showed that, even before the deregulation, insider trading seemed to be endemic. The great sceptic David Hopkinson, due to retire in the month of

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Big Bang in October 1986, sent Goodison a public warning letter at the end of that summer, with only months to go. ‘I hope that the big

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to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. On Monday morning, the computer screens went live and the new world had begun. Three decades on, the mistakes of Big Bang have grown painfully clear. Conflicts of interest are endemic. The new culture that those years ushered in on both sides of the Atlantic, so alien

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to be their responsibility to inform you if they are also betting against you elsewhere, which is one of the more squalid by-products of Big Bang. The German bank IKB bought lots of CDOs. One Wall Street investor tipped off the Financial Times that IKB was seen as a ‘patsy’,

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s Mein Kampf as one of the ten most harmful books of the past two centuries. Enough said. Barings was over two centuries old by Big Bang. The bank had taken part in the frenetic series of acquisitions in the spring of 1984 by buying Henderson Crosthwaite (Far East), intending to

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generation. And now the changes are happening even faster. The ferocious trading in shares, linked to mergers and acquisitions, which galvanized the markets after Big Bang, is less lucrative now because the fees have to be split between such an array of different advisers and lawyers. Increasingly over the past decade

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what has driven the emergence of what Citicorp called ‘plutonomy’, driving up the wealth of the richest 1 per cent of earners beginning around Big Bang in 1986 and accelerating terrifyingly under Tony Blair at its height from 2003 to 2005. It is not happening in the same way in most

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shift, believing it was somehow a necessary correction to trade union power, without realizing that it was corroding their own lives too. The post-Big Bang financial sector no longer sees its main function as raising money for productive enterprise run by the middle classes. It buys, sells and repackages financial

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class — the One Per Cent — extremely wealthy. But huge sums of money roaring through an economy create inflation, so the peculiar side-effect of Big Bang has been to ring-fence this success, to keep down the wages, to constrain the producers, and do anything necessary to make sure this cascade

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trickle down much further. Could it have been different? Would it have been possible to modernize the stock exchange without ushering in this corrosive monster? Big Bang, or something like it, certainly had to happen, but those voices that warned about the dangers of the new investment banks, of the conflicts

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company occupational pension schemes thrived. They gave individuals the protection of being in a large group. They also provided the capital needed to develop the City of London as a major financial centre. Then, over the past quarter of a century, the whole edifice started to unravel. People who speak of a

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and — like Warren Buffett — he has kept up a sceptical commentary about the excesses of his own sector. We miss people like that in the City of London, where the grandees tend to stick together. He spent the years before 1977 struggling for control of the mutual funds he ran before finally getting

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of money to fall. The staggering influx of wealth into Spain during the previous century had operated rather as the cascade of wealth into the City of London has operated in our own time. Instead of financing production, it was frittered away on interest payments for debt, buying luxury goods from abroad,

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of it. Our politicians have not yet seen that the measures taken to make speculation the central purpose of the UK economy — the miscalculations of Big Bang and all that followed — are creating the same small elite and pushing the middle classes slowly into poverty and dependence. That is what will

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the basis of their professional expertise. Most of all, they naively believed that the rapid growth of financial services, and the money pouring into the City of London, would benefit them — when actually it seems to be destroying them. The new elite, the Übermenschen, ushered in by the policies of successive governments,

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been carried out in the name of banking diversity and competition, but it has had precisely the opposite effect. The disastrous reforms of the City of London known as Big Bang were organized to protect London’s role in global finance, but turned a blind eye to the culture of greed and corruption that followed

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They cheered the corrosive growth of financial services in the City of London and ignored their excesses. They believed those in charge of their financial institutions had their class interests at heart, when they had nothing of the kind. They did not understand where Big Bang would lead — and where it would inevitably lead: if

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247 Bank of America, 96, 155 Bank of England, 58, 65, 67, 72, 135, 148 and bank mergers, 95–6 ‘Blue Skies Plan’, 137 and City of London, 129–30 Bank of Ireland, 110, 122 Bank of Scotland, 118 bankers’ pay and bonuses, 142–4 banking crisis, 12, 17, 25, 118, 151, 155

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76, 81 see also nurseries Cisco, 114 Citibank, 96, 100 Citigroup (Citicorp), 146 secret reports, 24–6, 152, 159 Citizens’ Charter, 222–3, 258 City of London, 129–31 deregulation, 134–40, 147–51, 285 hostility to industry, 152 and occupational pensions, 190 pay and bonuses, 142–4, 149–50, 160–1 Clarke, Kenneth

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt

by Kwasi Kwarteng  · 12 May 2014  · 632pp  · 159,454 words

in a continental war against the power of France, under the reign of its vainglorious king, Louis XIV. The financial innovations introduced, particularly in the City of London, as a consequence of this development have been called collectively ‘the Financial Revolution’. More generally, ‘England was at war for twenty-nine of the sixty

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‘money-raising machine’, its function being to draw on the immense ‘fund of credit’ which was already perceived to exist within the confines of the City of London.4 The money raised was given to the government in December 1694 and in return it paid 8 per cent a year, a relatively high

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rate even at the time, but a sign of how desperately the government needed the funds.5 The City of London had already acquired many of the attributes which would mark its future character. It was an exciting place, where men from many different countries could

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’s great goodness to me in advancing me to a considerable estate from a very small beginning’.9 Even in the late sevententh century, the City of London was known as a place where fortunes could be made from trade and finance. Some might even point to the fifteenth-century story of Dick

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, often very simply by a notice in a newspaper advertising a company and offering to take subscriptions at one of the many coffeehouses in the City of London. These bubble companies mostly did not survive, although two insurance companies which later flourished, the Royal Exchange and London Assurance, owed their origin to this

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and to £60 million by the end of 1748. It was also true, contrary to what some exponents of free enterprise might surmise, that the City of London’s complex structures of services could not have been built up by the mid-eighteenth century without the government’s extensive borrowing needs. There was

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, John and Charles, in 1762.28 Barings would eventually, in the course of the nineteenth century, become one of the greatest banking concerns in the City of London. Baring’s views regarding a paper currency were more advanced than those of Edmund Burke, and Baring actually knew what he was talking about. He

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high Victorian finance is one of gentlemen in frock coats wearing gold watch chains, reading crisply folded newspapers in darkened, oak-panelled rooms in the City of London. This picture of certainty and time-honoured tradition is largely a caricature. The foundations of Victorian finance were a lot shakier than historians have often

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mid-Victorian England. Reliance on a gold standard did not, however, prevent speculation and financial incompetence. The collapse of Overend, Gurney in 1866 shook the City of London. Walter Bagehot, the great Victorian journalist, described the partners of Overend, Gurney as men who had ‘great estates, which had mostly been made in the

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metaphor, the losses were ‘made in a manner so reckless and so foolish, that one would think a child who had lent money in the City of London would have lent it better’.33 The problem of Overend, Gurney was a familiar one to businesses in all periods. The old members of the

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Roger Fry, a member of the wealthy Quaker Fry family who had made a fortune in chocolate.7 The ease and tranquillity with which the City of London conducted Britain’s financial affairs gave rise to a certain complacency about the country’s place in the world. This was a world in which

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during the war itself, and writing trenchantly in support of civil liberties.9 His book on the Stock Exchange presents an interesting insight into the City of London at the apex of its power. The statements in the book have an air of oracular authority. ‘For British Consols [the standard British gilts] to

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yield more than 3 per cent in time of peace and prosperous trade is certainly abnormal,’ he declared. The City of London that Hirst described was the centre of an intricate network of international finance. In the words of the American journalist and historian Herbert Feis, London

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wealth of the English Upper and Upper-Middle classes’. Yet this picture of insouciant luxury hides some of the hard, professional work undertaken in the City of London at that time. The late nineteenth century was, after all, the period when professions such as accountancy received their first official recognition. The Institute of

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and a top hat every day’. After a few months of this hellish experience, Meinertzhagen joined the army, where he was much happier. While the City of London continued to suffer its share of hucksters and confidence tricksters, it also attracted talented foreigners who made considerable fortunes. Men like the German-born Sir

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a stud farm at Moulton Paddocks in Newmarket.30 Yet despite the enormous worldly success of people like Cassel, and despite its cosmopolitan charm, the City of London was, by 1914, a reflection of fading grandeur, of a country whose industrial position had been overtaken by the United States and Germany. The City

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economic and, more particularly, as a financial centre is made more complicated by the reality that many of the American financiers who benefited from the City of London’s eclipse were passionate Anglophiles. No American financier was more of an Anglophile than J. P. Morgan Jr, the son of the man who had

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the Second World War, the former belligerents on the continent of Europe were exhausted and demoralized. No country seemed more tired than Great Britain. The City of London, for decades one of the most tangible symbols of British economic power, was not only physically devastated by Nazi bombs, but seemed to retain very

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generally calculated that Britain ‘had lost a quarter of its pre-war national wealth’.2 The Englishman who most represented the orthodox view of the City of London between the wars had probably been Montagu Norman, not Keynes, who had been too much of an intellectual and social maverick to win the City

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shared than produced’.7 More specifically and ominously, Dalton’s own relations with the City were, in the words of a modern historian of the City of London, ‘fatally undermined by a mixture of ignorance and emotional immaturity’.8 The nature of Britain’s post-war problem, a country with little export trade

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public spending. As already observed, these features of monetarism were not that different, in their practical force, from the old Peelite mantra, emanating from the City of London in the nineteenth century, of a sound currency and balanced budgets. It has almost become a cliché to suggest that Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s

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poor public finances in the aftermath of the events of 2008 even worse. In addition to privatization, there also occurred the regulatory reform of the City of London. In 1986, ‘Big Bang’ changed life within the Square Mile for ever. The ‘traditional and class-based’ culture of the City was swept away

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. Big Bang itself happened on 27 October 1986, but for three years, following the 1983 agreement between the Stock Exchange and the Department of Trade and Industry, ‘

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Stock Exchange and the government had been an undertaking, on the part of the City of London, to drop fixed commissions and to open itself to competition. These steps had ushered in the market reforms of 1986 known as Big Bang. In the light of the events of October 1987 in which international markets crashed

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the Stop of the Exchequer of 1672, when Charles II’s government refused to pay the interest on its outstanding debts to goldsmiths in the City of London. It is unlikely that either of these governments, or those of any of the other leading economies, will embark on this course. The second way

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Revisited, Working Papers in Economic History, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, January 2007, p. 1. 15Andreades, History, p. 367. 16DNB, ‘William Lidderdale’. 17David Kynaston, The City of London: Golden Years, 1890–1914, London, 1995, p. 40. 18Andreades, History, p. 369. 19Dudley Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, Hull, 1993, p

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, at pp. 117–18. 24Nicholas A. H. Stacey, English Accountancy: A Study in Social and Economic History, 1800–1954, London, 1954, p. 37. 25Kynaston, The City of London: Golden Years, p. 21. 26Ibid., p. 319. 27Ibid., p. 26. 28Camplin, The Rise of the Plutocrats, p. 60. 29Saemy Japhet, Recollections from my Business Life

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Response to the Marshall Plan’, Economic History Review, New Series, vol. 37, no. 3 (August 1984), pp. 391–408, at p. 392. 2David Kynaston, The City of London: A Club No More, 1945–2000, London, 2001, p. 2. 3Ibid., p. 11. 4DNB, ‘Hugh Dalton’. 5Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, London, 1985, p. 445. 6Ibid

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., p. 455. 7Correlli Barnett, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945–1950, London, 1995, p. 182. 8Kynaston, The City of London: A Club No More, p. 9. 9Ibid., p. 41. 10Ibid., pp. 108–9. 11Ibid., p. 110. 12Newton, ‘The Sterling Crisis’, p. 400. 13TNA, T236/1669

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: the Dollar Drain, Sir Edward Bridges to Hugh Dalton, 11th November, 1947’. 15Ibid., ‘Outward Telegram to Treasury, 3rd December 1947’. 16DNB, ‘Stafford Cripps’. 17Kynaston, The City of London: A Club No More, p. 33. 18TNA, T269/1, Robert Hall, ‘Caliban: The Future of Sterling’, memorandum dated 16 June 1949. 19Ibid., Douglas Jay, ‘Dollar

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Situation’, dated 6 July 1949. 20Kynaston, The City of London: A Club No More, p. 23. 21TNA, T269/1, note from Cameron Cobbold to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, dated 18 June 1949; note from

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. 22TNA, T236/1758, note dated 14 July 1949. 23TNA, T269/1, Robert Hall, ‘Caliban: The Future of Sterling’, memorandum dated 16 June 1949. 24Kynaston, The City of London: A Club No More, p. 33. 25Alec Cairncross and Barry Eichengreen, Sterling in Decline: The Devaluations of 1931, 1949 and 1967, Oxford, 1983, p. 121

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: How the Electronic Economy Has Destabilized the World’s Markets and Created Financial Chaos, New York, 1993. Kynaston, David, The City of London: A Club No More, 1945–2000, London, 2001. Kynaston, David, The City of London: Golden Years, 1890–1914, London, 1995. Kynge, James, China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation, London

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, 181, 246, 331 Cieza de Léon, Pedro, 13 Citicorp, 230 Citizens Against Government Waste, 310 City of London, 24–5, 27 ad hoc financial arrangements, 86 Bagehot’s account of, 63–4 and Barings crisis, 85–6 Big Bang deregulation, 258 decline as financial centre, 97, 106, 108 dependence on government, 38 in Edwardian period, 82

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, 63–4, 100, 105 London, Edwardian, 81–3, 86–9 London Assurance, 36 London School of Economics, 114, 125 London Stock Exchange, 27, 88 and Big Bang reforms, 258 and outbreak of First World War, 90–1 London Zoo, 85 Long, Senator Russell, 168 Louis XIV, King, 24, 30, 32, 43, 49

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile

by Alexander Davidson  · 1 Apr 2008  · 368pp  · 32,950 words

, With love THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK vi THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK vii THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK viii Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 The City of London Introduction The City defined Financial markets The City as a world leader No gain without pain Markets are people The future The next step xlvii

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Association of Insurance Fraud Agencies for kindly inviting me to its 2007 annual meeting. Detective Superintendent David Clarke filled me in with developments at the City of London Police related to combating fraud. Alan McQuillan, interim director of the Assets Recovery Agency, was exceptionally helpful in answering questions. Both Lloyd’s and the

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Financial Services Authority referred to subsequently as the FSA, and the London Stock Exchange as the LSE. THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK lx Introduction The City of London is vast and complex. It is developing not just every month but every day and every minute. It has progressed even since this book went

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, and there is another on money laundering. Research for these chapters has taken input from government officials, lawyers and fraud-busting bodies such as the City of London police and the Serious Fraud Office. As before, we give the stock market early prominence in the book. You will find here enough to help

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knuckle. It was fun to prepare this second edition for you, and I hope you will enjoy reading it. 1 The City of London Introduction In this chapter we will define the City of London in geographical and product terms, and see how it has developed from the cosy club that it was until the mid

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this is fundamental even in an era where electronic links cross geographical boundaries with ease. The City relies still on face-to-face contact. _________________________________________ THE CITY OF LONDON 5  Over the years, even the physical boundaries have extended beyond the traditional square mile. One of the most important City locations is Canary Wharf

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position, the City has historically taken risks. The United States has invented such products as exchange-traded funds, financial derivatives and credit derivatives, and the City of London has adopted and exploited them. The City has reached its current status through trial and error over the decades. In the 19th century the UK

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of sterling that had been in force since 1939. UK institutional investors started adding substantially to their overseas investments, although mostly through foreign brokers. _________________________________________ THE CITY OF LONDON 7  In the 1980s, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) was the unrivalled leader among European exchanges. In July 1983, it came to a historic agreement

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single capacity in stockbrokers, a move intended to make them more competitive. The changes came into force on 27 October 1986, and were known as Big Bang. The jobber had been a wholesaler of stock to the broker but was suddenly made obsolete. In came broker dealers, whose role merged the previous

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, and trading on the floor of the Exchange was replaced with the screen-based Stock Exchange Automated Quotations (SEAQ) system. At around the time of Big Bang, US banks were coming to London because the Glass–Steagall Act prevented them from conducting retail and investment banking business simultaneously. The popular perception of

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the City had been as a club of florid-faced ex-public school chaps with a penchant for long liquid lunches. With Big Bang, a new type of City worker, competitive and egalitarian, was stepping into key roles. Information technology, including the electronic order book on the London Stock

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City require heavy socialising and sales skills, and an ability to deal with clients, a criterion fully reflected in today’s stringent recruitment process. _________________________________________ THE CITY OF LONDON 9  In the City, status comes from the size of the pay packet and bonus more than the intellectual demands of the job, although some

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and early 15th centuries, some Italian merchants from Lombardy came to London, and set up as money lenders in Lombard Street, the part of the City of London where banking activities are still concentrated. British banking started in the 17th century, with rich merchants storing their money in the vaults of goldsmiths because

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on European exchanges, according to The Cost of Capital: An International Comparison, an Oxera study in June 2006, jointly commissioned by the LSE and the City of London. Pricing The issuer and book runner set the issue price ideally at the maximum level acceptable to institutional investors. If the deal is oversubscribed, the

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a centralised trading system. The London Stock Exchange (LSE) dominates UK equity trading, although on a pan-European perspective it has lost market leadership since Big Bang in 1987 (see Chapter 1). The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), implemented in November 2007, is intended to enhance competition, particularly across borders. Until

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does now through CREST. Until August 1996, the LSE handled its own settlement of share trades, but not very efficiently. Following the 1986 market deregulation known as Big Bang, trading volumes exploded through the late 1980s, which put extra pressure on the LSE’s Talisman settlement system. The LSE decided to replace Talisman

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’ believed that if London was to remain _______________________________ FINANCIAL SERVICES REGULATION 191  Europe’s leading financial services centre, it had to lead by regulation. In 1986, Big Bang ushered in reforms, as discussed in Chapter 1, that were part of a move to reduce the role of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) as

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Authority (FSA), the City regulator. Boiler rooms Let us look at an area of the City where the combined efforts of the FSA and the City of London Police have not been able to crack a problem. This is the fraud committed by boiler rooms selling worthless shares from Spain or Germany or

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in practice be able to take action against it, except if UK-based individuals are linked to the scam, which is sometimes the case. The City of London Police coordinates Operation Archway, the national intelligence reporting system for boiler room fraud. The boiler rooms were once only a telephone sales scam but now

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and female, were posing as distributors of free newspapers near cashpoints in the West End, particularly around Oxford Circus, Mayfair and Goodge Street, and the City of London. They waited until their victim, typically a woman, had keyed in her pin number and hit the ‘get cash’ option before they approached her on

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risk-based approach to fraud prevention within regulated firms, but there was a view that it might leave room for abuse. ___________________________________________ FINANCIAL FRAUD 209  City of London Police The City of London Police force has 158 officers dedicated to preventing and investigating fraud, and is well resourced for this purpose in comparison with other police forces

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plastic cards, and another on boiler room frauds. If government proposals following consultation on the Fraud Review come about (see early in this chapter), the City of London Police will be elevated from south-east lead to national lead force. The force has agreed to take on between four and six cases of

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an industry presentation in May 2007, he said the first year of SOCA had been ‘clunky’, but that SOCA enjoyed a strong relationship with the City of London Police. In its 2006/2007 annual report, SOCA said that its operational work in its first year included, among other things, the consolidation of the

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it can learn anything from them. The SFO does work closely with other City bodies fighting fraud, and has been forging closer ties with the City of London Police. It shares with the police a special vehicle that it parks outside the house in raids, and that has facilities to make copies of

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is only intelligence and, in criminal matters, letters of request are also needed,’ Stephen Annis, a detective constable in the economic crime department of the City of London Police, told the September 2007 annual meeting of the International Association of Insurance Fraud Agencies in Lisbon. The United States Under the Bank Secrecy Act

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good grounds for their suspicion in a significant proportion of cases and the SARs are probably the most underused source of intelligence, it found. The City of London Police claims, unlike some police forces, to check all the SARs that are passed on to it. Resources to catch money launderers are not so

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Relations Society, www.ir-soc.org.uk IR On the Net, www.ironthenet.com Law enforcement and similar Assets Recovery Agency, www.assetsrecovery.gov.uk City of London Police, www.cityoflondon.police.uk Serious Fraud Office, www.sfo.gov.uk Serious Organised Crime Agency, www.soca.gov.uk Money laundering and fraud The

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170 analysts 172–78 fundamental 172–74 others 177–78 Spitzer impact 174–75 technical 175–77 anti-fraud agencies Assets Recovery Agency 211–13 City of London Police 209 Financial Services Authority 208 Financial Crime and Intelligence Division 208 Insurance Fraud Bureau 209 Insurance Fraud Investigators Group 209 International Association of Insurance

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) 145 international (ICSD) 145 Central Warrants Trading Service 73 Chancellor of the Exchequer 12, 13, 229 Chicago Mercantile Exchange 65 Citigroup 136, 145, 150 City of London 4–9 Big Bang 7 definition 4 employment in 8–9 financial markets 5 geography 4–5 history 6–7 services offered 4 world leader 5–6 clearing

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Private Bank 180–81 CB Richard Ellis Ltd 270–71 CDP xlviii–l Charles Schwab UK Ltd lvi–lviii City Jet Ltd x–xii The City of London inside front cover EBS Dealing Resource International 110–11 Edelman xx ESCP-EAP European School of Management vi ICAS (The Inst. of Chartered Accountants of

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times

by Lionel Barber  · 5 Nov 2020

Riyadh to Tehran, Tokyo and Washington. I interviewed presidents (Obama, Putin, Trump) as well as leading businessmen and financiers on Wall Street and in the City of London. And I was granted audiences with royalty such as Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Mohammed bin Salman, the strongman of Saudi Arabia. These men of

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between 2005 and 2007 when the global economy was living in a credit bubble, oblivious of the impending financial crisis. I saw first hand ‘peak’ City of London, when hedge funds and private equity ruled the roost and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), soon to go spectacularly bust, ranked in the top ten

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a concentration of power round the governor, but it’s a necessary adjustment. As I chair an evening fringe debate on the future of the City of London, assuming there is one, there’s stomach-churning news from Washington. The House of Representatives has rejected the US government’s TARP bailout for the

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PM seems to think that the only salvation for the euro is via a great leap forward on economic integration. He’s worried about the City of London being exposed to new regulations, with the UK on the sidelines. I’m not sure the Germans are ready for the big leap. Nothing much

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saved the euro. 2013 Happy Anniversary The Financial Times celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2013. We had come a long way since the four-page City of London newspaper pledged in 1888 to be the friend of the ‘Honest Financier and the Respectable Stockbroker’. One hundred and twenty-five years later, we had

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are too negative about Britain’s standing in the EU. We’ve chalked up wins on the proposed European banking union which will protect the City of London. There’s a reasonable deal on the EU budget as well as agreement on carbon emission limits by 2030. Heywood is more worried about the

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passage: ‘Our owners have understood that [editorial independence] means the right to investigate and the liberty to voice uncomfortable opinions. We report deeply on the City of London and Brussels but we are not a house organ. We adhere to the liberal market tradition of Adam Smith, but also to the robust irreverence

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to foreign workers. I ask her if the problem is immigration from the EU? Has she put immigration ahead of, say, the interests of the City of London? ‘It’s not a binary choice,’ the PM replies. (‘Not binary’ will become the two most overused words in the May and later Johnson governments

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but makes an even more important point about life after our departure from the EU. In the past 30 years, the City of London has never had it so good. Thatcher’s Big Bang deregulation attracted well-capitalised American investment banks which swallowed up the UK houses. The launch of the euro gave a second fillip

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, 341 Bernanke, Ben 94–5 Bezos, Jeff 60n, 189, 215, 276, 282, 398 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 244, 246 Bhutto, Benazir 41, 41n, 170, 171 Big Bang deregulation, City of London 429 Big Shorts 134, 134n Bild 283, 292 Black, Conrad 197, 227 Blackhurst, Chris 192 Blackstone xiv, 46–7, 103–4, 118–20, 333, 377

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, Anatoly 229 Churchill, Winston 24, 24n, 95, 128, 314, 310, 364, 422 Citigroup 68, 69, 85, 113, 114, 228, 404 City Lecture, Cambridge University 264 City of London xii, xiii, 25n, 106, 180, 224, 259, 297, 334, 365, 366, 429 Clark, Pilita 379 Clegg, Miriam 151, 195 Clegg, Nick 151–2, 158, 159

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’s Brideshead Revisited. Bracken piloted the 1945 merger of the Financial News and the Financial Times. 10 The Square Mile is synonymous with the old City of London financial district with modern skyscrapers towering over medieval alleyways. 11 As managing editor, Dan Bogler was my right-hand man for budget and personnel in

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money

by Owen Walker  · 4 Mar 2021  · 278pp  · 82,771 words

The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money Contents 1 Made in Maidstone 2 Follow the Money 3 Big Bang 4 Taking a Punt on Henley 5 Making Middle England Rich 6 The Fucking Americans 7 Breakaway 8 Oracle of Oxford 9 Liquidity Trap 10

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Woodford into multi-millionaires, but has severely failed the likes of Pauline Snelson and Fred Hiscock, the very people it is supposed to serve. 3 Big Bang Neil Russell Woodford was born on 2 March 1960 in the affluent Berkshire village of Cookham. His parents, Victor and Pamela, lived at 75 Westwood

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took on the project and embraced it with zeal. The agreement with the stock exchange, which came into force in 1986, was known as the Big Bang and fundamentally shifted the balance of power in financial markets from New York to London. For decades, Wall Street had been the centre of global

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finance. But the Big Bang made the City more competitive and opened the market up to international banks. The reforms sparked a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the Square

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opportunities and riches on offer. For centuries, London’s financial capital had chiefly been the domain of blue-blooded former public schoolboys, but Thatcher’s Big Bang went some way towards democratizing and regenerating the historic institutions. At the same time, electronic trading was introduced to the City and brought London kicking

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tall sash windows boasted commanding views of the gently flowing Thames. It was a world away from the characterless glass towers shooting up across the City of London and Docklands. The building had been derelict and crumbling when Arbib took possession of it, promising the town council he would bring it back to

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in eight venues in seven different cities, including the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, the Lowry Hotel in Manchester and the Eight Moorgate club in the City of London. The salesmen found that the hype surrounding Woodford IM’s launch meant they were pushing against open doors. The platforms and advisers were desperate to

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to provide historic context for earlier periods of Woodford’s career. David Kynaston’s comprehensive City of London series is the first port of call for anyone interested in the Square Mile in the 1980s. Bill Kay’s The Big Bang is an accessible contemporaneous account of the period. I am especially grateful to Bill

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being generous with his feedback. Iain Martin’s Crash Bang Wallop offers a useful thirty-year perspective on the seismic changes brought on by the Big Bang. Science, the State, and the City, by former FT editor Geoffrey Owen and Michael Hopkins, is an authoritative study of the problematic marriage between Britain

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–5, 166, 167, 194, 196, 218 best-buy lists 16, 159–60, 161, 170, 173, 177, 181, 192, 202, 213–14 Bestinvest 90, 161, 214 Big Bang deregulation, City of London (1986) 27 Bilton, Anton 8, 151, 165, 188 biomass 75, 80, 84 biotech industry 68–73, 121–3, 131–2, 135, 144, 154, 184, 224

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84 Circassia Pharmaceuticals 130, 135–6, 178, 196 Citicorp 53 Citizens and Southern Bank 50 City of London 7, 22, 23, 27, 31, 32, 35, 37, 48, 57, 70, 71, 110, 113, 121–2, 138, 185, 203, 205, 224 Big Bang (1986) 27–9 Black Monday (1987) 30, 36 electronic trading introduced 27 Financial Services

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian  · 4 Apr 2023  · 360pp  · 107,124 words

Kong on the South China Sea. In contrast to the shock treatment meted out by Augusto Pinochet to Chile after his 1973 coup, or the Big Bang overnight price reforms carried out in postcommunist Russia and Eastern Europe, China used a model of “experimental gradualism,” opening up sluices and locks to foreign

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reach of US regulators. Individuals, foreign-owned banks, and later major oil-exporting states like Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates used the City of London as a place to deposit money and organize large loans. As Britain’s overseas empire dissolved, a “Second British Empire” arose in its place as

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bird that laid its eggs in the walled city and crowded out the city’s own native offspring.9 After Margaret Thatcher deregulated financial services with the so-called Big Bang in 1986, the City burst out of its confines and spawned a double of itself downstream, in a grove of glass skyscrapers

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Stock Exchange’s shift to electronic trading. The same shift was happening in London, driving people out of the cramped, historically protected buildings of the City of London. Built around central elevator shafts, those buildings could not accommodate the demand for the vast floors of monitors and cooling systems for the new age

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claim the land for a community trust, given to local residents to develop in their own interests.54 The group organized clerical workers in the City of London and even mobilized to have the anachronistic medieval government that ruled the financial district abolished.55 The Docklands was another focus of their efforts. The

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is the most famous example of the use of the zone in the late twentieth century.128 By 2012, it housed more bankers than the City of London.129 To its champions, it tells the story of a stirring vision of untrammeled entry and experimentation—the seductive tale of economic freedom. But it

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semiconductors, Texas Instruments, had opened a plant; Apple followed in 1981.38 Singapore also built up its financial sector by taking a page from the City of London. Winsemius recalled a financier holding a globe and pointing out the island’s location halfway between the markets closing in San Francisco and opening in

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health care, it implied low taxes, deregulation, and the erosion of worker rights, a combination of the offshore tax haven and the sweatshop. It also alluded to the rapid rise of Singapore as an international finance center. The focus was often on how the City of London might have more opportunities after leaving the

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grid.”75 Another wrote that, as with Singapore, the only variable was “boldness.”76 The chancellor promised a repetition of the Thatcherite moment of deregulation: a “Big Bang 2.0.”77 In their emphasis on the virtues of exit, some of the Tory ideologues showed their debt to the fast-moving world of

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, bound by personal ties that float above and beyond the confines of terrestrial nation-states.13 For centuries the heart of the profession was the City of London, but the introduction of income tax in many countries around the time of the First World War created more incentive for secreting away personal wealth

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quadrupling of oil prices after the 1973–74 oil embargo made it rich. The Gulf’s oil money was recycled through financial centers like the City of London, leaving a huge pool of cash available to be loaned out. While most of the oil was in Abu Dhabi, Dubai confirmed the presence of

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turned to a more nationalist form of economic development, yet at the same time it opened new special economic zones for Korean investment.46 The City of London is returning to its twentieth-century roots by trying to invent itself as an offshore market for cryptocurrency banking, doubling down on the one thing

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35, no. 4 (October 2010): 459. In 2006, the Corporation of London’s name was changed to the City of London Corporation.     4.  Shaxson, Treasure Islands, 71.     5.  Shaxson, 71.     6.  Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, “Uncovering the City of London Corporation: Territory and Temporalities in the New State Capitalism,” Environment & Planning A: Economy and Space (2022): 5

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turned upside down citizenship(s) citizen-customers by contract “contract citizens” in Liechtenstein multiple opt-in, opt-out version of replaced by customers rights of City of London city-states Civil War (US), revisionist interpretations of clans Clavell, James climate change Clinton, Bill cloud country coaling stations Cold War end of colonialism free

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Self-Governance Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination Lim, Louisa Lithuania Livingstone, Ken Li Yang Lobo, Porfirio “Pepe” “localized freedom” logistics parks London, England. See also City of London; London Docklands London Black Women’s Health Action Project London Docklands London Docklands Development Corporation London Eye London Gateway port London Stock Exchange Long Good

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, Baron de “roving capital” Royal Docks Enterprise Zone Royal Dutch Shell Royal Navy rubber rule of law rules Russia. See also Soviet Union in 1990s Big Bang overnight price reforms in Dubai and invasion of Ukraine oligarchs in special economic zones (SEZs) in Russians sacrifice zones Saez, Emmanuel Sandy Springs, Georgia San

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Technology Museum Shining Path shipping. See also container ships shopping malls, as models Shriver, Lionel Sierra Leone Silicon Oasis Silicon Valley colonialism Singapore China and City of London and as city-state Confucian-communitarian values in democracy in elections in “good governance” and growth model of “Housing for the People” program in index

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tax pirates tax rates as theft Taylor, Jared Tebbit, Norman tech criticism tech libertarianism tech sector “techxodus” telecommunications terrorism Texas Texas Instruments Thailand Thatcher, Margaret Big Bang and as patron saint of Euroskeptics Right to Buy program Singapore and Thatcherism Theranos Thiel, Peter “three withouts” Thyssen Tiananmen Square, protest at tin Tlon

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British Empire; specific locations in 1976 in 1978 Big Bang in after Brexit Brexit and drift away from manufacturing and agriculture Hong Kong and invasion of Iraq and London Docklands National Health Service in nation branding and secession and Singapore model and (see also City of London) tax rates in Trucial States and welfare state

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber  · 3 Oct 2024  · 424pp  · 123,730 words

old zaibatsu, the speed and networked relationships of Silicon Valley, and an ethos of speculation and mercenary management cherry-picked from Wall Street and the City of London. Most of all, for anyone interested in the human condition, Masa’s story is one of personal invention: how to become somebody when you are

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? In industry jargon, this was known as ‘hitting the air pocket’, the moment when growth stalls. Segars was also mistrustful of his shareholders in the City of London, who were inveterate short-termists compared to their US counterparts. ‘The Americans only talked about the technology, not the earnings. For the British, it was

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won a choral scholarship to read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. Like many gifted, money-minded Oxbridge graduates at the time, he jumped to the City of London, joining Lazard and then Morgan Stanley. After the financial crisis, when Morgan Stanley wobbled, along with other top Wall Street banks, Robey stuck around for

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, thanks to a revision in Japan’s nationality law successfully pushed by zainichi Koreans. 9. What Does It Take to Win? fn1 By comparison with ‘Big Bang’ deregulation in New York and then London, Tokyo was more measured. fn2 Under the scheme, employees later had to take out loans to pay for the

Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System

by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner and Andrew Jackson  · 14 Apr 2012

-rate caps. UK Conservative finance ministers Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson oversaw the abolition of all controls over consumer credit together with the deregulation of housing finance in the ‘Big Bang’ reforms of 1986.109 Compulsory liquidity reserve ratios were gradually reduced from the 12.5 per cent set in 1971, until eventually

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a loan – no money is being taken from anywhere else. For a useful guide to the historical use of interest see Pettifor (2006)73 * The City of London Corporation, the municipal authority for London’s financial district, has unusual powers to this day, often expressed in ceremonial oddities such as the granting of

The Rise of the Network Society

by Manuel Castells  · 31 Aug 1996  · 843pp  · 223,858 words

financial markets in most countries, and the liberalization of cross-border transactions. A turning point in this process of deregulation was the so-called “Big Bang” of the City of London on October 27, 1987. This new financial freedom allowed capital from all sources to be mobilized from anywhere to be invested anywhere. In the US

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advantage of their loosely regulated environment to attract financial transactions, winning market shares over a more regulated Tokyo stock-exchange market. The full deregulation of financial markets in the City of London in October 1987 opened a new era of financial globalization, in spite (or because?) of the simultaneous October 1987 crash in the

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time consciousness”, in J. Hassard (ed.), The Sociology of Time, London: Macmillan, pp. 105–29. —— and Leyshon, A. (1992) “In the wake of money: the City of London and the accumulation of value”, in L. Budd and S. Whimster (eds), Global Finance and Urban Living: A Study of Metropolitan Change, London: Routledge, pp

Unfinished Business

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Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation

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The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets

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Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

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How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life

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Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society

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