Repent, repent, he cries but all the guests with one accord begin to make excuses
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
frinity Church stands at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, with its back to the badlands of 931, and one year later Bill McDonough, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, preached a sermon there. Central bankers do preach sermons, but not often from the text he chose: our duty to our neighbour. Too many business chieftains, he said, had found it easier to help themselves: 'Twenty years ago, the average chief executive of a public company made 42 times as much as the average production worker. Perhaps one could justify that by the additional education required, the greater dedication, even the harder work. The average present-day chief executive makes over 400 times the average employee's income. I am old enough to have known both those of 20 years ago and those of today. I can assure you that we chief executives of today are not ten times better than those of 20 years ago.' The chieftains purported to represent value for money, but when that value proved spurious, they walked away with their personalised shower curtains at $6,000 a throw, while their neighbours suffered. Laws and rules might now seek to prevent this, but how much better if the best companies' leaders renounced their excessive rewards and shared them with their neighbours. That was well said. I, too, believe that there is more to good conduct and good character in business than being nice to trees, or complying with codes and ticking boxes, or even setting up foundations in the chief executive's name with the company's money — but I wonder how the congregation took this. Perhaps, like the guests in the Gospel, they all with one accord began to make excuses.
Short, fat, long, thin
FOR his next sermon, I hope that Bill McDonough will take the text about false prophets and spurious miracles. There were plenty of them on view when the new technology had made it possible to gather grapes from thistles. I find it strange, now, that credulity should linger on among shareholders and directors who tell themselves that what they need is a miracle-worker. No wonder that their chief executives' tenure of office gets shorter and shorter. Like Lord Rothermere II at the Daily Mail, they have tried a short fat editor so now they want to try a long thin one. The effects are perverse. The successful candidate insists on danger
money and he checks his parachute. He is there to deliver instant results, so he looks for dramatic effects, while the accounts are adjusted to show that all the trouble was his predecessor's fault and change now can only be for the better. Troubled businesses may need patient and resolute management, but it is easier to head-hunt a new prophet and then hope for miracles.
Wine into water
THERE are repentant sinners, at least, in the boardroom of Aberdeen Asset Management, where the miracle-workers are settling for smaller rewards and renouncing (or rather postponing) their bonuses. They have performed the financial equivalent of transforming wine into water, a feat for which the chief shaman, Chris Fishwick, was rewarded last year with £5 million. Four of the trusts that they manage have now sunk beneath the waves and others are looking distinctly unseaworthy. Until now Aberdeen's chief claim to notoriety has been to forsake the Dee for the Thames and sponsor the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. I expect that the Financial Services Authority will require next year's crews to wear life-jackets.
Yes, Sir Siegmund
I WOULD never have stayed the course with Siegmund Warburg, even if my handwriting had got past his lady graphologist. He might sometimes forgive large mistakes (as Lord Roll once said of him) but never small ones. In the early days of Euromoney we misprinted the article he wrote for us, and his bellows of rage rang down the telephone and out across Finsbury Circus. 'Yes, Sir Siegmund,' said Sandra, who fielded the call. No. Sir Siegmund. How dreadful, Sir Siegmund' — and finally: 'That was Sir Siegmund Warburg. Hasn't he got a
strong Pakistani accent?' Now, for his centenary, the bank that this ferocious perfectionist founded has commissioned a brief life from David Kynaston, the City's historian, who ranks him with Nathan Meyer Rothschild. These two 'damn foreigners' came to the City, stood it on its head, and made it a great international marketplace, to its lasting advantage. The house of Rothschild backed Siegmund Warburg when he started again, and he never forgot it.
Great expectations
I WAS a little worried to hear Gordon Brown in Blackpool promising to build the Great Society. The last politician to promise this was Lyndon Johnson, and the greatest thing about it was the bill. Together with his Great War in Vietnam, it set the American government borrowing and printing money, and in the end brought down the dollar. Our own dear Chancellor, after five years of buoyant revenues, is promising to step up spending just as the trick begins to look less easy. Next month he will scale down his forecasts for growth. Then watch Tax Freedom Day recede.
Les francs-tireurs
PREFERRING Avignon to Washington. I seem to have missed the International Monetary Fund's meeting — a poor, shrunken jamboree this year, scarcely worth demonstrating against. Instead I have been pursuing my study of comparative purchasing power, and I am pleased to report that the ten-franc kir is going strong. This, as you may remember, stands for the exchange rate at which it became economic to drink in France. My contacts in the monetary resistance movement (les francs-tireurs) tell me that the pound stands at 10.40 francs, at the underground rate derived from the usurping euro. Even at this rate, Europe's leading economies now find their new currency too tight a fit. Germany is choking. They would all like the chance to print or borrow more money and regret having promised each other that they never would. I expect that, in the end, they will deal a round of 'Get out of jail free' cards, to be used when needed, or sold. This will not help to make the euro credible, but ought to be good news for visiting kir drinkers.
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