Gold-fixing is the last ghost of the old City. It won’t be around much longer

In a season obsessed with sport and personal misbehaviour — separately or in combination — the word ‘fixing’ immediately brings to mind ‘match-fixing’, as in ‘Two World Cup referees suspected’ of it, and ‘Former New Zealand cricketer banned for life’ for it, to pick at random from this week’s headlines. ‘Gold-fixing’, by contrast, is a phrase of which the City has been proud for almost a century. But the imminent demise of its historic gold-fixing system is yet another parable of changing times. Since September 1919, the price of gold has been ‘fixed’ daily by five of London’s leading bullion dealers. In the era when the dollar price per ounce was already set by the US Treasury, first at $20.67 and then, from 1934 until the link was severed in 1971, at $35, movements were narrow and the fix hosted by Rothschilds was little more than a ritual reaffirmation of what those of us who went to work in the Square Mile a generation ago were invariably taught: that London was pre-eminent in global trading, and that its clubbable, pragmatic, trust-based style of dealing was both beyond reproach and universally admired.