Agents and patients
WHAT have our stock market's leaders invested in? Farms, says Margaret Reid farms from Gloucestershire to the Dor- dogne, and heated swimming pools all over Surrey. The proven winners from the City revolution are those who got off the wheel early. Some 25 partners in the great jobbing firm of Wedd Durlacher were bought out for £1 million or more each. The revolution devoured that and every other big Stock Exchange firm ex- cept Cazenove, reducing them to branch offices of British or foreign banks. They had lived too easily for too long inside their cartel. When competition broke in on them, they lacked the resources, of capital and management, which would have let them stand and fight. They knew how to run away, though. Firms were being sold out at five times their earnings or twelve times their asset value. Nowadays net asset value might be the touch, and as for the earnings — what earnings? All-Change in the City (Macmillan, £16.95) is Margaret Reid's chronicle of the revolution which spread far beyond the Stock Exchange and through the City, not excepting the Bank of England — part revolutionary agent, part patient. This will be a standard work to go beside her account of the banking crisis of the 1970s, which her publishers should now reissue complete with the 40 per cent which, I believe, was cut out as too libellous to mention.
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