CITY AND SUBURBAN
Take it easy, Mr Bond, help is on the way Miss Moneypenny will fix it
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
What a thing to say in front of Vir- ginia Bottomley. Sean Connery pops up in Edinburgh as patron of its fdm festival and complains that our politicians don't know the film industry from a hole in the ground. That is just Mrs Bottomley's point. The hole is there already but she wants to make it bigger and to throw more money in. A suitable advisory committee has now told her that with tax breaks, lottery money and a dip in the European bran-tub, British film-making would burgeon. Ministers and committees have been saying this sort of thing to each other for as long as I can remember — it was one of Harold Wilson's numerous obsessions — and the film- makers for their part have been able to absorb any money that was thrown at them, as the shareholders of Goldcrest or the creditors of Palace Pictures could confirm. Film finance has a short section of its own in my Bad Investment Guide. My man in the canvas-backed chair says that what our film-makers like to do is make films, and accountancy bores them. So they come up with a succes d'estime and a series of flops d'estime follow. Then faithless financiers or ignorant politicians are wheeled on to take the blame. The suitable committee notes that most film-makers outside America are subsidised and that most of the films we go to see are American. It then shies away from the obvious conclusion. As for Mr Connery, he may have a personal grievance. One of the film-makers' missed opportunities was to cast him as Bond opposite Mrs Bottomley as Moneypenny.
Wilting in the . . .
HOW DEEP and how uneasy is the money markets' August calm. The chief dealers and the corporate treasurers are in their usual boltholes on the Italian lakes, their deputies are sweating it out at the office, tempers shorten, nerves fray and anxieties find something to feed on. Sometimes it is the pound sterling but this time it is the sin- gle currency. Is this really, ask the deputies, the done deal we have all been told it was? Will the French really come up to scratch? If it were up to Jean-Claude Trichet at the Banque de France, he would sign tomor- row. He is a senior member of the small club of Platonic guardians, most of them at school with one another, who have long since decided that a single currency is what they want and thus what France wants. Before last year's elections he had a run-in with Jacques Chirac. An unelected central banker, said the presidential candidate, should stay in his well-appointed box and stop trying to run the economy.
. . . heat of August
NOW THE president has reopened hostili- ties. Where, he would unattributably like to know, was the governor when the French banks were getting into such expensive trouble? Where was he when the seeds of trouble were sown? Now it seems that for- eign banks — Anglo-Saxon banks, even may have to be asked to come in with new capital. Oh, the shame of it. It is easy to see in this picked quarrel a new sign of tension between what the single currency requires and what the creaking French economy might otherwise be said to need. Easier still to see that when a government falls out with its central bank — never mind which of them is in the right — its credit suffers. All that a deputy needs to work out is that he will be safer to keep on the windy side of the franc until the boss comes back. That, in the markets of August, is how the trou- ble starts.
Spot the difference
TO WATCH Professor Littlechild telling the National Grid to cut its prices by a quarter is to realise how different our enlightened times are from the bad old days. When the Grid and the other utility companies all belonged to the state, they would be made to hold their prices down in front of an election, as a matter of political necessity. Afterwards they could catch up. Nowadays they have impartial regulators like the Littlechild of Birmingham, whose current message to his flock is 'No more Mr Nice Guy'. He has taken his lead from his opposite number, Clare Spottiswoode, the lady who stepped on the Gas. This is the way to keep those rebates coming. An elec- tion is coming, too, but that must be a coincidence.
Gold bug on the ticket
JACK KEMP, picked by Robert Dole as the active ingredient in the Republican ticket, belongs to a select chapel: he believes in the gold standard. I shall count on him to make President Dole reopen the window at Fort Knox, slammed shut by Richard Nixon, and restore the dollar's link to gold. I do not claim to be a true believer, but I am sure that the official purveyors of money would be all the better with some competition, and that is what gold repre- sents. As a store of value and a medium of exchange it has outperformed paper money for most of the century. No wonder that the world's finance ministers and central bankers, or most of them, have done their best to push this inconvenient competitor towards the sidelines and force us to accept their depreciating paper promises. The economist Friedrich Hayek thought it wrong to give the organs of the state a monopoly of printing money. Everybody should be allowed to join in, and may the best money win. I note with interest that Jack Kemp is a Hayek buff.
Shuttle service
THESE ARE nail-biting times for the 224 banks which lent money to Eurotunnel and wonder what they are going to get back instead. A merchant banker now offers a helpful suggestion. Since the immediate value of Eurotunnel's shares depends on the travel vouchers that go with them, this benefit, he says, should be made transfer- able and extended to the creditors: 'The scheme has numerous advantages. It would ensure that Le Shuttle was full of carloads of bankers building up their busineas mileage as they rush from London to Pans and Brussels. It would give them opportuni- ties to find other grand European projects to finance, such as mountains of dead and supposedly mad cows. Alternatively, they could take their friends and clients to the Deauville races.' All this and a market 10 voucher futures, too. Well worth exploring.
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