Martin Vander Weyer: How many times must we save the City?

Top of my Christmas reading pile is Saving the City by Richard Roberts, a new account of the largely forgotten crisis which afflicted global markets at the outbreak of the first world war, forcing the London Stock Exchange to close on Friday 31 July 1914 and stay dark for six months. It’s a reminder of how often in modern times the City has had to be ‘saved’ — including May 1866 when Overend & Gurney collapsed, November 1890 when ‘Nemesis overtook Croesus’ in the first Baring crisis, and of course the bailouts of October 2008. It’s also a reminder of another book on my shelf, subtitled The Night the City Was Saved. That one, The Cedar Story by Charles Gordon, is an account of the dramas of 19 December 1973 — 40 years ago this week — when a Who’s Who of the City was summoned to the Bank of England to prevent a crippled ‘fringe bank’ called Cedar Holdings from provoking a domino collapse across the financial sector.