About this programme by Peter Day
It was quite delicious to be bicycling around London in the silvery chill earlier this month, dropping in on people we wanted to contribute to this programme on what the likely business and economic landscape will look like when the dust of collapse filling our lungs and eyes at the moment finally clears.
I am also helping with a Radio 3 documentary on the great Anglo-German composer Handel, and so thoughts about the fast-growing London of the early 18th century kept breaking in as I cycled off in pursuit of experts who might have some idea about the great economic turmoil of the early 21st century.
(It is not so dissimilar to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, which ruined many famous men of the time, but not your Mr Handel, who had seemingly safely withdrawn his investment in the South Sea Company before the bubble burst; an even more creative thinker, Sir Isaac Newton, Keeper of the Royal Mint, had not.)
So I cycled to the London School of Economics to see the director and man of the world Sir Howard Davies; from there I nipped along Fleet Street (Handel would have gone by carriage, or maybe horseback) to Goldman Sachs, close to the old Daily Telegraph building.
With a distracting view to St Paul’s Cathedral, I there met their Jim O’Neill, a former director of Manchester United and moving spirit behind the BRICs thesis about the looming rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China to the world economic top table by the middle of this century..I’m still not sure about Brazil.
Then west across London past Buckingham Palace to hear from the Capital Economics economist Roger Bootle, and back to hedge fund land in Mayfair (where Handel had his home in Brook Street for 36 years) to see the veteran Financial Times commentator John Plender and the director of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, Andrew Hilton.
Another of the delicious things about this assignment was that occasionally criss-crossing London I would run into one of my sons, currently both earning not much of a living as cycle couriers (but exhilarated by it), speeding in the opposite direction. With such brief encounters London shrinks to the size of an 18th century city of random encounters.
But of course the cycle courier business cannot escape the effects of credit crunch and recession, as cheques are no longer sped across the city, nor clothes and shoes rushed to fashion shoots. The number of jobs (and the pay) is down a third or so in the past year.
That’s how a bubble bursting leaks into many aspects of life removed from the front line of the City of London, rippling through the whole economy which looked so immune only 12 months ago.
That’s what this programme is all about, and on the whole it’s a very gloomy outlook indeed. The programme was nice to do but not nice to listen to.
There was one extraordinary coincidence. The last time I interviewed Andrew Hilton of the CSFI (see above) we did the interview in a quaint little office the Centre has in a house just off Curzon Street in Mayfair, the haunt of gamblers and spooks from MI5. “The house used to be a brothel,” he confided to me at the end of the interview, I was looking forward to mentioning that as a quirky factoid in this programme.
But when I cycled up to the former brothel, I realised he was in his other office, just five minutes away, close to the Ritz Hotel.
When I got there, I expressed my disappointment at the lack of that particular frisson, so he gave me another one: “Until just before Christmas,” Andrew Hilton pointed out, “two floors of this building were the European headquarters of the Bernard Madoff organisation.”
Mr Madoff is now accused, of course, of a $50billion dollar swindle. The dealing room in Mayfair is dark. Andrew’s location wonderfully matched the programme theme.
Just down the road is a branch of Boots the Chemist. According to the New York Times, Mrs Madoff used to insist that a London employee of the organisation kept her stocked up in New York with a regular supply of Boots No 7 Protect and Perfect Beauty Serum.
Thus the burst bubble runs through the whole economy, right down to the cosmetics counter of the Piccadilly Boots.
It’s been a programme I’ve loved making, all that cycling around in the greyness of a London winter. But it is not very uplifting to listen to, with a preponderance of gloomy old men.
Handel’s London seems to have recovered rapidly after the drama of the South Sea Bubble, which was (even in proportion to our own troubles) the most enormous bust. Most of the gloomy old men have their doubts about the same thing happening this time round.
|
CONTRIBUTORS
Sir Howard Davies,
Director, London School of Economics
Andrew Hilton,
Director, Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation
Roger Bootle,
Chief Economic Adviser to Deloittes,
Jim O’Neill,
Head of Global Economic Research, Goldman Sachs
Michael Hughes,
Independent Economic Adviser
John Plender,
Chairman Quintain
|
![[an error occurred while processing this directive]](/staticarchive/6f5326659d791140d906c6a70b21c63b7bf79d07.gif){kind=small}
Currently off-air, visit 'Previous programmes'