Читать книгу The Bucks Stop Here - Jim Parton - Страница 6

A huge wave of relief might have been expected to sweep the financial markets with the Gulf War ceasefire. Instead it was the signal for a return to stock market torpor. The start of the war had got people frantically dealing, so the end proved to be an anti-climax. It was already too late to buy.

The grim reaper moved away from the Iraqi slit trenches and visited the equities trading floor at Merrill Lynch, where a market maker, a salesman and the two most attractive girls in the office were made redundant.

The salesman was delighted because he had taken out redundancy insurance, which for surprisingly modest premiums would pay him more than he had been earning anyway for two years. In his spare time he had been contributing to the Jewish hour on Spectrum radio, and he could now pursue his ambition to build a career as a disc jockey. His name isn’t yet sufficiently well known to drop, but I have seen him a couple of times on Sky Super Channel. (Just in case he gets famous I mention that he has changed his name from Mark Jaffé to Mark Jeffries.) The thought crossed my mind that I should investigate this insurance.

The girls were tearful and, being ‘foolish virgins’, had no insurance. They were going to be a great loss to sexist bastards like myself who enjoyed looking them up and down but apart from the intangible economic benefit of keeping morale high with male staff (the overwhelming majority in any City office), they were an obvious area for cost cutting.

The market maker, Ron, trying to look brave and not unmanned, was ashen-faced.

‘You’ll get another job with your experience, Ron.’

‘It’s not the environment, Jim, but I’ll be all right.’

Since the 1987 Crash, mass redundancy had been a feature of City life, but virtually everyone who lost his job soon found another, frequently better paid. I feared that for solid, competent, but unexceptional people like Ron, such times were running out.

On the other hand I was slightly envious, having had no holiday in the eight months since joining Merrill Lynch. Egypt was a distant, fond memory. A skiing holiday was coming up soon but a decent spell of redundancy would not go amiss, if healthily paid for by the Prudential. Insuring myself would be prudent; my Japanese clients had been decidedly quiet thanks to Saddam Hussein and although I was in constant receipt of assurances that Merrill Lynch were Here-For-The-Long-Term, the place had the feel of Bomber Command circa 1943. There was a pervasive if forced jollity as people failed to come back from sorties into the boss’s office. At the back of most people’s minds was the thought, ‘Ron bought it in the last lot, who’s next?’

Despite the change of firm, I still didn’t like stockbroking. I was like a Norwegian Blue pining for the fjords. From where I sat it was impossible to tell whether it was a sunny day outside the airless office in which I squandered my disappearing youth, but much as I’d have liked to have been doing something completely different, I was in a trap. My mortgage was larger than the value of my house in fashionable Camberwell, I had a free-spending wife, a fearsome Japanese of Korean descent, and four-year-old Gen due to go to an income absorbing school soon, plus an overdraft that seemed to grow in direct proportion to the amount of money I was earning. This last, a not inconsiderable amount, was scarcely stratospheric by City standards, even if it was more than the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I glanced at my Reuters screen in an attempt to piece together clues as to which way the dollar might be going, and what effect that would have on European company profits. It didn’t take long to decide that I didn’t care.

At times like this, when the stock markets were quiet, which despite the popular image was almost all of the time, I would ring up a tame client called Mr Hoshide. I had no sensible advice to offer him, and he had only a tiny fund. The importance of the relationship lay in the fact that we could engage each other ad nauseam in inane conversations about interest rates, or interim results, thereby looking busy and professional to our respective colleagues. I could speak Japanese to him, and thus appear to be working when in fact we might be discussing sumo or rugby. If I called him five times it would look as if I had called five clients.

Mr Hoshide worked in the tiny London investment office of a giant life assurance company. A charming and amusing man, he had the faults at times of being a bit over meticulous, and pedantic, but at heart was a long way from the stereotypical Japanese, being comfortingly idle.

The stereotype is in any case wrong. Idleness is a trait you find in more and more Japanese, particularly of thirty or under. Office workers put in fabulous hours, but they don’t work hard. Japan is beginning to suffer from advanced country disease, with a real option on leaving school of decadence rather than work.

The Japanese people suffered during the war, then suffered building the world’s mightiest economy. The parents and grandparents of the current generation of young adults don’t want to put their children through what they went through. People like Mr Hoshide were thus thoroughly spoilt and pampered as kids. So was my wife.

Mr Hoshide was on a two-year stint in London. He was thrilled to be away from the one-and-a-half-hour each way commute he had in Tokyo and the long, long hours in the office, a lot of them spent reading cartoon books to pass the time, followed by the duty of going out to get pissed with workmates. Mrs Hoshide liked London because she didn’t have to put him to bed drunk so often, then kick him out of bed at 7 a.m., still stinking.

As a salesman, the best use I could be to him was to supply easily reworkable reports from our analysts that he could send back to his head office, passing them off as his own work.

Most evenings I followed a complex routine of picking up Gen from his friend Rory’s nanny, whipping round Tesco, then processing him for bed, my wife usually being busy until late with her Japanese TV people. Normally I would have to read half a dozen Thomas the Tank Engine stories, but that night, with the Gulf ceasefire just announced, Gen and I opted to watch the Nine O’Clock News in the parental bedroom; he loved all the burnt-out tanks and lorries and the sand reminded him of Egypt.

‘When can I go to Egypt and have Coca Cola and crips (sic) again?’ he asked.

Eight o’clock was his putative bed time, but not a target ever attained.

I have no recollection of the end of the news, only of being shaken awake by my affectionate wife, Rika, with a requirement to expel Gen back to his quarters. The television was still on. I attempted to cling to consciousness for a little while in the vain hope of getting lucky, but the telephone went. Knowing it would be a Japanese colleague freshly unsqueezed from his morning train with an earnest desire to talk cathode ray tubes, I went to sleep.

Friday’s morning meeting would normally have been greeted with more enthusiasm than most. In this one, however, the news was that German truck sales were weakening, the dollar was basing, and East Germans were going on strike. Dullsburg, Schleswig-Holstein.

I battled manfully to stave off sleep as half a dozen stock analysts talked us through their ideas of the day by taking frantic notes. Later I rang up my Japanese clients and bored them rigid with what I had heard. Unsurprisingly I received no orders that day.

Talking to the Japanese is an activity that requires specialists at the best of times, because their English is so dire, and because of a prejudice exacerbated by the likes of Clive James that they have no sense of humour and are just a tiny little bit mad. Madness cannot be held against them, after all, the British are palpably a little bit mad too, and in my opinion a degree of madness is healthy. Imagine how awful it would be to be Swiss.

The perception that the Japanese have no sense of humour is wrong. These days even Clive James laughs with them rather than at them, the sneer replaced by something approaching affection. Humour is language based and sadly a lot gets lost in translation, so proving my thesis that the Japanese can be witty is tricky, but take it from me, it’s not unknown. Having said that, Japanese fund managers are as dull as English fund managers.

My job was made doubly difficult by the mess their financial institutions had got themselves into in believing that their stock and property markets would rise forever. Despite falling by a third, Tokyo’s stock market continued to look very expensive by Western standards, and anomalies remained, such as the grounds of the Emperor’s Palace continuing to be worth more than the state of California. Should anybody undo the bits of string and sticky tape holding the whole thing together, the collapse would be spectacular. Preventing this was where Japanese financial firepower was concentrated, so there was little spare cash for investing overseas and enriching the likes of me.

I assumed that my employers did not understand this. After all, they had taken me on a mere eight months previously when such things should have been pretty obvious. Very intelligent people rarely get to the top in stockbroking because they offend too many stupid people on the way up, and end up being stabbed in the back. This could be true of any profession – politics springs to mind. Our managers at Merrill’s were all Americans in their fifties who had got to where they were by offending nobody.

The grandfatherly head of sales, and the grandmotherly head of research, had told me when I arrived that it would not be too long before the Japanese became a force to be reckoned with in European equities. Their experience of the Japanese and of European equities was garnered selling US equities to American private investors for thirty years in Peoria, Pa. I hoped that they would keep thinking bullishly about Japan a little longer, because my secret personal view was pretty cataclysmic. The Japanese were in such shit that it would be perhaps five years before levels of activity made a decent recovery, but with luck it would be a couple of years before Merrill Lynch realised this, so that I could continue to earn more than the Chancellor for producing next to nothing. Merrills would continue to travel hopefully rather than arrive. By the time they realised that with me they would never arrive, I would be on my way to yet another new firm.

Selling on hope had been a speciality of mine. I speak fluent Japanese, therefore it was assumed that I would be able to communicate very efficiently with Japanese investors and persuade them to do their investment through me. In five years I had worked for five companies. The first three, Laurence Prust, Vickers da Costa, and Scrimgeour Vickers, have all been closed down by the foreign banks who bought them. I was the eternal trainee, always promising lots, but in terms of revenues delivering nothing. Each time I came under pressure to produce, I changed jobs – switching from selling UK equities to the Japanese to selling Japanese equities to the UK, then back again to selling UK equities to the Japanese, then finally Europe to the Japanese. I was well into my third year as a stockbroker before getting my first order, yet my salary nearly doubled each of those years.

I started on £11,000 at Laurence Prust, and left them eight months later for £17,000 at Vickers da Costa, which became part of Citicorp Scrimgeour Vickers. Almost exactly a year later there was a massive storm in London. I cycled to work, ducking the fallen trees, and was one of the few to make it in. My boss was one of the others. I had announced my intention of transferring internally from the Vickers da Costa bit, where I was a trainee Japanese equity salesman, to become a trainee UK equities salesman in the Scrimgeour Kemp Gee bit, selling to the Japanese. My idea was that I would be one of few Brits able to talk to his clients in their native language. The Wall of Money was coming.

My boss tried to dissuade me. He pointed out that commission rates were lower in the UK. I hadn’t quite worked out the direct link between commission earned on the one hand, and salary and bonus received on the other. These things were just paid to me, without my understanding why. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that my failing to spot this crucial relationship was responsible for my failure to become obscenely rich. If only I’d stuck with Japanese equities, or better still, gone into Japanese warrants.

My boss gave me a £10,000 pay rise. It was Friday 17th October 1987. That afternoon certain perturbations began to occur over on Wall Street, and by Monday, markets worldwide were in free fall. I still made the transfer to Scrimgeours, but they paid £10,000 more for me than they would have.

At this stage, I had never had an order as such. I had offered stock once.

‘Where is it?’ I was asked. This had seemed a funny question at the time. Why did the fund manager care where it was? The back office would cope with that. ‘Locked up in some bank vault somewhere, I suppose,’ I answered.

‘No, where is it?’

‘I don’t know, I’ll go and ask someone,’ I volunteered helpfully, and leant across to ask a colleague, who informed me that ‘where’, in City parlance means ‘how much’.

At this stage in my career, having never received an order, and not understanding that ‘where’ can mean ‘how much’, I was worth £27,000 a year to my employer. By the time I had three years on my C.V. it was a bit difficult to disguise the fact that I might actually have accumulated some experience, so rather than promising what I myself would become, I promised what my client base would become. The Japanese had scarcely diversified a fraction of their mammoth portfolios into Europe, as so far it had all gone to the US, but the great Wall of Money was confidently predicted. The terrific thing about the Wall of Money was that nobody knew when it would arrive. You had to be prepared, because by the time it did arrive the Japanese, with their notorious love of long-term relationships, would only give business to the brokers who they knew and trusted. Therefore you had to employ Jim Parton. The consequences of missing this bonanza were too terrible to contemplate, so even if for the moment I produced little in the way of commission, a great day would come, it was imagined, when I and my team would support the rest of whatever firm I worked for.

So far, of course, the Wall of Money had never arrived and to me at least it was obvious that it never would, but I felt pretty safe. Management at Merrill Lynch was as chaotic as at P & D. Since my arrival, Mike Hewitt, plus the nice grandfatherly head of sales, who had been my direct boss, and the rotund granny from the Bronx with the sexy anklet, had all gone on to different things and whilst Merrill Lynch New York or Tokyo might have sound views on Japan’s economy available for dissemination, inter-office rivalry would prevent them ever reaching my new boss’s ears and poisoning his view of my long-term worth to London.

However, the new boss was at least twenty-five years younger than the grandfatherly head of sales, and keen to make his mark, so I would have to be on my guard.

Chopping non revenue earners is an easy way of demonstrating corporate machismo, even if it is at the expense of the long term.

Keep a low profile, draw that fat salary and survive was my philosophy. A Little, Oscillating Dick, as opposed to a Big Swinging one.