Читать книгу The Bucks Stop Here - Jim Parton - Страница 4

I couldn’t see the point of suffering in the City of London if the sums I earned were only mildly revolting as opposed to completely obscene. It was make or break; either up or out. I’d been a stockbroker for five years and I really wasn’t rich enough. I was doing well at UBS Phillips and Drew, a respectable, if crumby, firm but not well enough.

It seemed to me that there was a window of opportunity that led into the financial stratosphere, but it would soon be closed. My clients were Japanese investment institutions which had just poured trillions of Yen into European stock markets, optimistic that the unification of Germany and 1992 would lead to a new economic miracle. I thought I would be able to trade myself up because a lot of broking firms saw these trillions as just the start of the arrival of a Wall of Money from Japan.

The Japanese had had loads of money to spare after twenty years of raking it in from the rise and rise in their stock and property markets. In early 1990, however, the Nikkei had collapsed, and it seemed to me that property would not be far behind. The domino effect would soon hit other asset markets strongly influenced by the Japanese. The evidence was there for all to see in the plummeting values of second-hand Van Goghs, Ferraris, golf course developments in Esher and condominiums in Hawaii. Second-hand Jim Partons would be next. I was a ‘sell’, and had to put myself on the market immediately.

A broker in my position, sensing that he could squeeze more money out of a situation, would normally stride into the boss’s office and threaten to leave if his pay were not upped immediately. The trouble is that in my case they would probably have said ‘Fine Jim, go’. I had an enemy in Tokyo; he was doing very nicely out there on a tax-free salary and saw me as a threat, because I could speak Japanese and he couldn’t. It would have made sense for us to swap jobs. He was senior to me and made sure it didn’t happen by sending hostile faxes to my boss every so often about my ineffectualness. He had a point; I was a lousy broker, but such details have rarely been known to hold back a career at Phillips and Drew, so I felt quite hard done by.

With the road to riches at P & D blocked, I was more than amenable to a discreet suggestion from an acquaintance at Merrill Lynch that I should consider an interview to work there.

I had been at Phillips and Drew for almost two years, a long time by recent City standards. It was an extraordinary firm. With a reputation for being bland even before the Union Bank of Switzerland had bought it, it was amorphous, inchoate, a vast blob of ectoplasm absorbing and suffocating all the young men and the handful of women in its path. The dealing room, equal largest in the City with the UBS bond floor downstairs, had all the excitement of Heathrow Terminal Four. We sat in six or seven forty-yard rows of salesmen, analysts and dealers. Stockbroking by the Henry Ford method: you could have any colour you wanted, provided that it was grey. Even the corporate Swatches I gave to my clients at Christmas were grey.

As a financial institution, P & D’s chief merit is that it is enormous. If you want to find out about almost any company in Europe, somebody there will be able to tell you. It is unlikely that the analyst will be full of analysis, but he will at least have a set of earnings forecasts and a competent understanding of the crucial financial ratios.

P & D pundits are often interviewed on telly, and quoted in the papers, a sure sign of mediocrity. When I was at Citicorp Scrimgeour Vickers, in its period of steepest decline, its analysts started to appear with great frequency in the market reports of the Financial Times. If Scrimgeour had actually been doing the business, it would have been the last place they would want to have appeared; the client would be furious at the indiscretion. I didn’t have to trawl through many copies of the FT to find this example: ‘British Steel edged ahead 11/2p to 681/2p after its broker, UBS Phillips and Drew, turned buyer of the shares.’ Sixty salesmen, on a day the market rose 26 points to 2,516, could only push a major house stock up 11/2p.

There was absolutely no way that P & D made UBS any money. With my computer system, flashing telephone board, floor space, company car and share of deal settlement, I must have cost them at least £250,000 a year to employ, of which salary was only £35,000. Multiply that by 300, add in the cost of all the hospitality suites upstairs, plus the salaries of half a dozen burghers of Zurich called Ruedi, and you got some pretty big numbers.

Take a look at commission income from a typical salesman such as me, and you got some pretty small numbers.

Logically, UBS should have closed P & D down, although it would have been an expensive process, entailing the loss of a large amount of face back in Zurich, not to mention London. But there may be entirely different reasons as to why it has been kept going. Who knows? Certainly not I.

There is a rule in Switzerland that deposits unclaimed after fifty years belong to the bank that holds them. About that length of time ago rather a lot of wealthy middle Europeans lost their lives unexpectedly. Many of them would have put their money in numbered Swiss bank accounts for safety. In the 1990s, many Swiss banks’ capital ratios improved substantially, at a time when economic fundamentals suggest they ought to be deteriorating. If such a Swiss bank had a subsidiary that loses lots of money, this process could be made to look a lot less embarrassing.

Swiss bureaucracy had taken hold at P & D and management was chaotic. I used to reckon that if I were to stop phoning clients altogether, it would be at least three months before anyone noticed. I put something close to this theory to the test; not on purpose, but because I felt unenthusiastic about my job, and unenthusiastic about what the analysts were telling me to tell my clients, whom I therefore didn’t call all that often.

There were frequent changes and the creation of new responsibilities. A new memo would arrive on my desk each day along the lines of: ‘Smith will spearhead the marketing of Belgian equities into Andorra. Smith’s duties will be taken over by Jones, our new hiring from Warburgs.’ If Jones was leaving Warburgs it was because he was not a particularly high flier, and had realised that UBS was the only firm in the City still coughing up inordinate sums for his ilk. Which made it very ironic that I would need to leave P & D to earn my fortune.

The head of equities at P & D was Hector Sants, who despite being no older than most of his staff, was a somewhat remote figure. It was usually his signature on the memos about Belgian equities.

One should not despise mediocrity, as the purveyance thereof undoubtedly fills a market niche; a lot of fund managers don’t like razor-sharp stockbrokers because they feel intimidated by them. It is comforting to be brighter than your broker, which is perhaps why people with first class degrees almost never make good salesmen.

Also, if you understand too much about what you are saying, you spot the contradictions and find it difficult to continue. Sadly I can’t use a first as an explanation for my failure as a salesman.

My boss Jonathan didn’t either.

I regarded him as a thick, ignorant, abrasive, card-carrying nasty bastard. He didn’t have a degree, but he did have see-the-wood-for the-trees intelligence, a capacity to explain things very clearly, to see the big picture. He was one of the most successful salesmen P & D had and had thus been promoted to manager. He couldn’t manage much, but he did manage to spot the one thing that I had hoped would go unremarked. He said he thought I was ‘crap’.

There was one black person on the entire UBS trading floor. Of course, occasionally a black person would come and fix your computer, and you’d see plenty of Somali cleaners if you were working late at night, but Sharon was different. She worked on the economics team and fancied transferring to sales.

I bumped into her on the Northern Line going home one evening where she explained that she’d asked Jonathan whether she could join our team, and he’d said ‘No’.

‘He was very honest about it,’ she said without rancour. ‘He said he knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself, he didn’t want a woman on his team. I respect him for being so upfront about it.’

I’d heard a different explanation from Jonathan. To me he’d said, ‘Sharon, she’s quite good, but I could never have her on my team. She’s black.’

I think it unlikely that P & D would have fired me, but it was clear that I was unlikely to get richer there, either through an increase in my salary, or a rise into management, where I could begin to assist in the setting of my bonus. I rang up and accepted the Merrill Lynch interview offer.

When I went to see my future boss, Alick, at Merrill’s, it was clear that he had more or less made up his mind to offer me a job. He’d had this brilliantly original idea that stock sold by British and American clients could be bought by the Japanese, and vice versa, thus improving his distributive power. The only doubt in his mind was whether I would accept their offer. I was, after all, fluent in Japanese with five years’ broking experience, so presumably I could pick and choose.

The first interview therefore went swimmingly and I was called in for another to meet the ‘rest of the team’. This meeting took place over a few pints in a pub with Alick and his two colleagues Henry and Charlie, the latter of whom eschewed pints in favour of rather effete bottles of tasteless Mexican lager with lime sticking out of the top. I said I liked the idea of working in a team of four as opposed to the fifty or so at P & D, but made sure that they understood that Japanese money earmarked for overseas was still mainly tied up in Tokyo, so they shouldn’t expect too much of me in London. They assured me that they understood, and took a long-term view.

So far in the interview process I had been protected from senior management. After the pub I was taken in to meet Michael Hewitt. Mike Hewitt! I was at school with him. He was a year below me and a prize prat as far as I could recall. He had been an unusual teenage rebel. Back in 1977-ish, he wore the broadest bell-bottoms with which he could get away without expulsion, but unlike most teenage rebels his hair, jacket, indeed the bell-bottoms themselves were immaculate. He used to glide, ineffably smooth on highly polished illegal cowboy boots, with ridiculously impractical, forward sloping heels.

Thirteen years later the hair was still like the Virgin’s Conception, but bell-bottoms had given way to another form of rebellion, this time against City pinstripe. I am all for rebellions against the City dress code, which seems bent on making everyone look like Alan Sugar, but I found Mike’s olive-green suit from Milan with brown Guccis a bit disconcerting.

It was not entirely clear what his role was – he was in management – but he filled me in on Merrill Lynch and its ethos. He went on and on, seamlessly, and I soon lost track. They had something called matrix management. Mike was as smooth as he had been at school and had clearly mastered matrix management, or at least talking about it, which is the key in these things. He could even manage the plural of matrix correctly.

The three pints I had had were beginning to percolate through my system and I wished he would hurry up.

Mike clearly had me confused with an older, brainier brother who used to win the Pratt Latin unseen prize and the Smedley-Turgess Greek poetry prize every year by being the only person in the school to go in for them. As he went up for his tenth academic prize one Speech Day somebody could be heard from a few rows back saying, ‘My God, is that Pongo Parton’s son – he must have married somebody clever.’ Sadly I had inherited my father’s brains not my mother’s. A similar thing must have happened in the Hewitt family, because he recommended to Alick that I should be hired.

I had also inherited my father’s bladder – my entire family suffer from a high metabolic rate combined with low capacity, necessitating visits to the loo at short intervals.

Final hurdle. I met the Americans. Along with other US firms like Salomon Brothers or Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch has the reputation of being lean, mean, keen, thrusting, determined, ruthless, tenacious, assertive, sharp, not to say aggressive, so I was on my guard, but this interview was also a pushover. I had a pleasant chat with a nice grandfatherly man who was in charge of sales, and a nice, short, rotund, grandmotherly lady from the Bronx who was in charge of research. She was clearly clueless – who am I to criticise? – but had a misshapen sort of charm. I noticed a rather intriguing little gold anklet under her stocking dating presumably from svelter, sexier days.

After all these meetings I just had time for a further brief meeting with Alick who was thinking in terms of £45,000 a year. My bladder was killing me by this stage, so I just said ‘I’ll think about it, goodbye,’ and then dashed back to P & D.

In the evening I was phoned at home.

‘£55,000,’ said Alick tentatively.

We settled on sixty. I promised I would try to persuade P & D to reduce the three-month notice period I was on.

As I handed in my letter of resignation the next day, the head of overseas equities said ‘Jim, I think you’ve made absolutely the right decision,’ which was definitely not in the script. When a high-flier resigns, he is supposed to be kept ‘out of the market’ so that the firm he is leaving can nick his clients. I’d been thinking of three months of paid leisure on a yacht in the Mediterranean. ‘I expect you’ll want to start as soon as possible so we’ll reduce your notice period to a month. You can leave immediately.’

I visited Merrill Lynch towards lunchtime.

‘How did it go?’ asked Alick. ‘Did you have trouble persuading them to let you leave?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But they gave up when they realised how determined I was.’