Twenty-five years ago this week, I became managing director of BZW (predecessor of Barclays Capital) in Hong Kong. The office was unstable after a summer of firings, and I had been dispatched from Tokyo to steady the ship. On Friday afternoon, a man called Reggie from Warburgs shouted ‘Heard the news from home?’ across the lobby: the ‘great hurricane’ was battering BZW’s Thames-side headquarters and reducing its trading desks to a chaos of sodden paper and broken glass. On Monday markets crashed everywhere and I flew overnight to London to find panic turning to stoic resignation as our firm, barely a year old, sustained losses of £70 million. The bonus-fuelled post-Big Bang paraphernalia of investment banking had proved utterly feeble against the forces of nature.
Told to report to the gum-chewing chief executive, Lord Camoys, I ventured a remark about ‘the next support level’ at which Hong Kong might rally. ‘In these conditions,’ he growled, ‘there are no support levels.’
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