Banking on Murdoch
MANCHESTER, as you may know, is the Osaka of the Occident. Watching the Murdoch press excoriate the banks — we name the guilty men, write to your chair- man now — I thought of my encounter with Rupert Murdoch at Osaka airport. He had gone there, earlier this month, to confront the world's hundred most power- ful bankers. They had asked him to address them on scarce capital and credit allocation and he had accepted — sportingly, I said, for a man whose companies owe them some $8 billion. To the bankers, he likened himself to the toad beneath the harrow. He wondered if he had been right to depend so much on borrowing, and on so many different banks. A man who could play 146 banks off against each other can scarcely complain, as his papers do, of a bankers' cartel. What he will find and has found is that, when times get harder, the weak banks want to bolt the ticket. So many weak banks have bolted for home, so much capacity for lending has gone out of the market, that the survivors are better able to do business on their own terms. Lucky the man who borrowed his $8 billion in the easy times. In the hard times, the problems are his bankers'.
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