All those bills end up on the database big government is watching you
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Ithought that my bank would recognise me by now, if only with a light shudder. My account has been there for half a century, moving gently up
and down the street as the bank rebuilds its branches or gets taken over. Now comes the inevitable letter: send us your gas bill so that we can see who you are. In a way, I had been looking forward to this. I was going to dig my heels in, to court martyrdom, to ask what law or regulation lies behind this ludicrous request — but we know the answer already. Last year, when the Financial Services Authority was making our oldest bank, C. Hoare and Co., insist on gas bills, its regulators admitted that they had no formal power to enforce their will, but that bankers ought to comply if they knew what was good for them. By now this enforced bad habit has spread to stockbrokers, money managers and financial businesses of every sort. They ask to see passports, they have to see gas bills — all, in theory, in the noble cause of keeping moneylaunderers at bay. In practice, their reports pile up in some great bureaucratic warehouse and lie unread for months on end. Another official database (so to describe it) contains details of the bank accounts of everyone who wants to be a teacher. Applicants must identify themselves by filling in a form which asks for their account number, their sort code, and the confidential detail (like their mother's birthday) which the bank uses as a password. With that information, a hacker who can make his way into the database could hope to vacuum the account. All this, in theory, is to keep the paedophiles at bay. In practice, I dare say, baser motives are at work.
Bound to secrecy
Departments of state never mind storing away information about ourselves and our finances. One day, they imagine, it will come in handy, and the more they have on us, the better. Even if we have refrained from laundering money or abusing children, perhaps we have been paying less tax than we should have been. A glance at our records will give them a clue. Their latest achievement has been the Proceeds of Crime Act. This was supposed to stop villains from stowing their loot away — another noble cause, we can only agree — but now that it has been tested out in a divorce, the judge has ruled that lawyers must betray the confidences of their clients, reporting them to the National Crime Investigation Service if they find a single penny undeclared. Big government is watching us. As for my bank, I have not the heart to tease it — this gas-bill nonsense is not, after all, of its making — but when my account was first opened, its cheque-book carried a promise: 'The officers of the bank are bound to secrecy as regards the transactions of its customers.' If only they could be.
Tidal barrier
have hopes for Callum McCarthy, and sympathy, too. He used to be the electrical regulator at Ofgem — Offswitch, surely? — and lived in the riverside palace that once housed Imperial Chemical Industries. Now he has taken command at the grim dockside regulatorium of the Financial Services Authority, just upstream from the Thames Barrier. He will need it, for a tidal wave of directives is on its way to us from Brussels: the distance marketing directive, the insurance mediation directive, the financial groups directive, the market abuse directive and the prospectus directive. Spare us, he says. At Ofgem, he reckoned that the best way to help consumers was to make competition happen and bring prices down. It came as a shock to some of the suppliers. At the FSA, if he can cure his subordinates of their habit of collecting gas bills, he will do well.
Cable grinds higher
Daniel Gooch built the Great Western's broad-gauge flyers — Lord of the Isles, North Star but he earned his knighthood as chairman of the company that laid the transatlantic cable. This was the first direct link between the City's bankers and Wall Street's and they used it for trading their currencies, which is why the market still calls the sterling-dollar exchange rate the Cable Rate. Hence a telegraphic prophecy from Morgan Stanley: 'Cable grinds higher as dollar corrects.' This means that the pound is on its way up from $1.66 this week to $1.72 by the end of the year and $1.82 by the end of next — heights not seen for a decade and great news for martini fanciers. At the US Treasury, John Snow pays lip-service to the strong dollar, reminding Credit Suisse First Boston of the art of politics, as cited by Theodore Roosevelt: 'When you want to turn right, signal left.'
Park at a premium
The best contrary signal now on offer comes from the National Bank of Switzerland, which is urging us not to buy its staple product: 'Investments in Swiss francs must be kept unattractive,' it says. Well, now, attraction is relative. When money takes refuge in Switzerland, the guardian gnomes may expel it with skipoles, but still it recurs. They used to give it parking tickets — negative interest rates, meaning that you had to pay to leave your money in a Swiss bank. This turned out to be better than keeping your money in dollars or sterling, two currencies both of which rapidly fell off their perches. Sometimes a parking ticket can be a premium on an insurance policy. In Zurich, a gnome once rebuked me for calling something as good as gold: 'We do not like this saying. Gold is not as good as the Swiss franc.' Of course, if the National Bank has its way, gold will be even better.
Take the money
The banker Christopher Arnander — from Hill Samuel to Barclays the long way round, via Jeddah, Glyndebourne and Kuwait — has turned his hand to a pocket history of our financial times: Think Globally, Spend Locally (Profile Books, 18.99). His style is terse, but some of the cartoons he has collected tell the story with even more economy. Two bandits drowse under their hats: 'We could hold up the bank and take the money, then the IMF will have to send more money, then we hold up the bank and take the money . . . ' Unless, of course, someone higher up the food chain, like the head of state, has made off with it first.
Previous page
