Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
‘Does anyone remember David Laws?’ a former City colleague asked me during the brief interlude between the Lib Dem MP’s debut as financial secretary last Monday and his descent into hell on Friday. Judging by the sketchy accounts of his banking career in the weekend papers, with their references to a ‘billion-dollar gamble’ that made him a ‘multimillionaire’, few journalists bothered to track down City sources who really knew him in those days. But in fact he held the same title of managing director of Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW, the forerunner of Barclays Capital) that I once held myself. Laws joined BZW from JPMorgan shortly after I made an unexpected exit, so we never met, but several chums of mine worked alongside him. They remember a bright but cold fish who kept himself to himself (for reasons we now understand) amid the swaggering machismo of the trading floor.
Being called ‘managing director’ of an investment bank does not necessarily mean you manage or direct anything — it just means, as my boss growled shortly before he fired me, ‘the stakes are higher’. Laws was one of two senior lieutenants to the head of the bank’s money market operations. His role (deploying his Cambridge first in economics) was to inject analytical rigour into the team’s trading strategies, but he had the good fortune to be there at a time when it was relatively easy to see which way markets were going. Sterling interest rates fell from their Black Wednesday ERM-crisis peak of 15 per cent in September 1992 to 5.25 per cent by early 1994: as a result, huge profits could be had by buying sterling instruments in anticipation of further rate falls.
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