Top spots come up at the Bank, but the Queen and the Prime Minister take their time
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Down the Bank of England's stony corridors the secretaries tiptoe: 'Have you signed David's card? Would you like to chip in for his present?' His five-year term as Deputy Governor runs out at the end of the month, and everyone believes (though no one can quite say so) that David Clementi is off to the Prudential, which has belatedly decided that it needs a chairman with a background in finance. Saying hello to his successor has proved harder. This appointment is not in the Bank's gift. It must be made by the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister, and they have certainly taken their time about it. This week they are both on holiday — in different places, naturally — and so is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who might in practice have sent them a short list of one. In the next ten months they must fill or refill all three of the Bank's top spots. Mervyn King, the other Deputy Governor, is nearing the end of his own five-year term, and next summer Sir Edward George will head for Cornwall and hang up his new shingle: Dungovernin'. Mr King is the Bank's inhouse candidate and current favourite to succeed him. This first appointment might shake up the betting — that is, if the Bank, which had one Deputy Governor at a time for its first 303 years, really needs two of them now. The second came with Gordon Brown's reforms, which restored it to power over interest rates but diminished its other powers and duties. Mr King looks after monetary stability, publishes the Inflation Report with its charts of many colours, and is on the sharp end of policy-making. Mr Clementi is in charge of financial stability but does not supervise financial businesses or keep them stable. That is one of the duties the Chancellor took away.
The Fed on 9/11
ONE central banker who hopes that this never happens to him is Bill McDonough, who is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 'The Fed's hands-on involvement in bank supervision', so he was saying last month, 'is integral to its ability to meet its monetary policy responsibilities and contain or forestall crises, if they emerge.' One of them emerged in New York on 11 September, and the Fed was able to cope because it knew its flock of banks — people, systems, strengths, weak nesses — in every detail. In London, all that process of knowledge-gathering has been pushed off to the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England is responsible for the stability of the financial system as a whole, and the rest of of us are left to pray that no demarcation dispute breaks out between them when it matters. No wonder this job has spent so long in its august pending tray. I have noticed no rush to apply for it, even at £208,000 a year and the use of a parlour.
Holiday money
THIS IS the time of year when we were all supposed to come back from holiday converted to the euro. Once we had seen these dinky notes and coins in action, we would want them for ourselves, or that was the idea. It has not happened, or not yet, to judge by the latest poll conducted for Barclays Capital, which shows the euro's supporters still lagging and making no headway. My own expectations may well have been borne out. The procedure is unchanged. When abroad, we have continued to draw pocket money from hole-inthe-wall machines, debiting our bank accounts at home. Major expenses, like lunch, are put down on our credit cards and settled later in sterling. It may be that Britain in Europe has missed a trick. We should have been offered a charmingly informal study of the Blair family on holiday, euros in hand, gaily spending them.
Yacht brokers
SENATOR Tom DeLay knows what to do about the market's fallen idols: 'We're going after the yacht,' he says. Yachts have always been the outward and visible sign of financial success, which is why Fred Schwed called his good hard look at Wall Street Where Are The Customers' Yachts? Events have caught up with this classic, which is back in print (John Wiley, £14.99, complete with the Peter Arno illustrations) and we are stuck with the question he was asking sixty years ago. Was the money stolen, he wonders, or did you lose it? On the whole, he thinks we lost it: 'Nothing crooked — just bad luck and bad brains met together in an effort to do something that couldn't be done in the first place.' In soaring markets (in the 1920s, which he saw at first hand, or the 1990s) everything seems possible, and we settle down, like the Red Queen, to believe six impossible things before breakfast. If we believe in wonders, we are prepared to believe the wonder-workers. After all, we want to. Only when the illusion is shattered do we want to take their yachts away.
Playing on margin
THE innocents at large in Fred Schwed's day played the market on margin: that is, they bought their shares with borrowed money. Nowadays we know better. We leave that kind of thing to the professionals, like the investment trust managers who have so cleverly lost all their customers' money. Instead, we play the property market on margin. We borrow to get ourselves into the game, and if we are winning we borrow some more and gear up. Thinking we know how to play this game, we get deeper into it, buying, mortgaging and letting. Last month the mortgage providers approved more loans and lent more money than ever. Is buying on margin such a good game? No, says Fred: 'But I only know one way of proving this to you conclusively. Go try it.' Nothing prepares you for the shock of losing a chunk of real money that you used to own, he says, just as there are some things that cannot adequately be explained to a virgin, either by words or pictures. Peter Arno does his best, though.
Park, ride, meet
THE curse of the grand head office can take many forms. It has done for Marconi, and now British Airways has found that its 2,000 car-parking spaces at Waterside will not suffice for the 4,200 people who will soon crowd in there. For them, so my aviation correspondent, Jumbo Speedbird, tells me, every fifth day will be park-and-ride day. They will have to hold more of their meetings off-site.
This is the second instalment of Pickering and Chatto's very valuable and covetable complete edition of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, a thing which has never been attempted before. Indeed, De Quincey himself thought the range and wide dispersal of his occasional writings over half a century was such that a collected edition would prove an impossible task. That, happily, is not the case, but it is certainly true that the great obscurity in which much of his writing has languished has meant that even a careful student of Romantic literature has only been able to hold a partial view of De Quincey, and one of the great pleasures of this edition is that it shows us a writer even more bewilderingly varied than anyone would have thought.
The edition is being issued in three parts, and this one might immediately strike the reader as being less obviously fascinating than other issues. It contains none of the celebrated performances, nor any of those precious gems which specialists so admire; not The Confessions of an English Opium Eater or Suspiria de Profundis, the essays on murder as one of the fine arts or the English mail coach, nor any of the superb biographical essays on the Lake poets or others (my favourite is the late, deadpan Last Days of Immanuel Kant). Nevertheless, there are few other writers who can be relied on to include, in the most obscure corners, some real surprise, and although these volumes contain not much other than commissioned essays on all sorts of bizarre subjects for the journals, they are full of delights.
That is not to evade the conclusion that De Quincey is a writer who is maddeningly frustrating and fascinating in about equal proportions. He is very rarely interested in being lucid, and makes a constant effort not to say the obvious thing about any subject, with the result that at his worst, the experience of reading him is like being hectored by a madman in a thunderstorm. Its not unusual to come across an essay by him and finish it without really knowing whether he was being funny or not; there is an essay here on some long-forgotten worthy called Professor Wilson which falls, to a disconcerting extent, into this category. The one essay which I find extremely funny here is, alas, inadvertently so. There may have been writers qualified to produce a paper called *Ricardo Made Easy', but De Quincey was emphatically not one of them, and this exhilarating exercise in obfuscation makes its way through something dimly resembling the thought of the great economist like a short-sighted rhinoceros, every so often telling us that it is all incred
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