CITY AND SUBURBAN
Thank you for our smashing Christmas bonuses, kind Uncles Eddie and Helmut
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Ido hope the City boys and girls now opening their Christmas stockings will remember to say thank you. They have been stuffed — the stockings, that is with good things. Many a fat bonus cheque nestles beneath the crackers and above the tangerines, some running into six figures and some into seven. This has been a won- derful year in the world's markets (only Japan has missed out) and at such times London as an international financial centre comes into its own. Even the homely stock of Her Majesty's Government has earned the gilt on its edges. It has risen to heights not scaled for 20 years, and on to this rising market the Bank of England as the Gov- ernment's issuing house has deftly unload- ed more than £45 billion of stock. Volume is value, in a City which proverbially lives by shovelling money around the world and keeping the coins that stick to the shovel. Imagine the commission as that stock goes round and round. So the Bank has helped pay the bonuses, even in a year without Black Wednesday. It has called the markets right, but think of the contribution from the central banks that called it wrong! They spent most of the summer, as Europe's exchange mechanism crumbled, trying to defend the indefensible. For the foreign exchange markets, which London dominates, and for all the ingenious bits of financial engineering that derive from them, the cen- tral banks presented a sitting target. It was hit for a fortune. The losers blamed this on an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy, and must now wince to see the winners taking their rewards. They are competitors, not conspir- ators, but they can agree to thank their benefactors. Thank you, Governors. Thank you, Uncles Eddie, Helmut and Co., thank you, Santa, and for my birthday I want to trade in my Porsche for a Maserati.
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