Christopher Fildes

New York No helicopters are flying in the cold clear skies above Liberty Street, home of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, from which I assume that monetary policy is in neutral. If money were running short, Ben Bernanke, successor-designate to Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed, would be prepared to contemplate an air-supply of dollar bills, dropping as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. An air-drop of gold ingots would, by contrast, constitute a health hazard, which is one reason why Mr Bernanke has no plans for it. Another is that he cannot produce the ingots for the asking. For that purpose, nothing compares with the printing press which, as he has pointed out, can produce extra dollars to order.

I have long thought that Alan Greenspan would have made a passable Dalai Lama. Those gnomic utterances, that air of inner calm, that instant access to a deep well of understanding.... The faithful have come to accept that the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board is the embodiment of power and wisdom, and they are now preparing themselves for his next incarnation. Ben Bernanke, sometime winner of the South Carolina state spelling-bee, then professor of economics at Princeton and authority on the Great Depression, is told that he will soon be the most powerful man in the world, and is so wise and clever that all will be well. To look the part, that little jutting beard may have to go; long, white and wispy would be better.... In what, though, does his power reside?

Boots, Boots, Boots, Boots, moving up and down again — no discharge in the war .... Just another change of strategy and an alliance with Alliance. Perhaps it will work better than in-store chiropody. Salients have come and gone, casualties mount, the line is rectified, and commanders succeed one another like British generals in the Western desert. The new plan is to merge with Alliance UniChem, thus giving Boots even more chemists’ shops. Until now, armchair strategists — the High Street is full of them — have assumed that Boots has quite enough shops. Its trouble has been to know what to do with them. What would people rather buy from Boots than from Tesco? Sandwiches? Something for the weekend?

It is all the fault of the fairy who came, uninvited, to Gordon Brown’s christening. Beside the scowling infant’s Moses basket, his godparents’ gifts of industry and ambition were assembled when this glittering creature approached him with a parcel of her own. ‘See, little man,’ she told him, ‘I’ve brought you the great gift of simplification.’ Then she curtsied, and presented it to him, upside down. After that, he grew up to be Chancellor and opened the parcel. Once in a generation, he announced, came the moment for a fundamental reform of the tax system. He set about it in his own way or, rather, in the fairy’s way. His Finance Bills grew longer and longer, like Pinocchio’s nose.

To put the lunatics in charge of the asylum makes admirable sense. They are the market for its services. They know where the straitjacket pinches. The Commissioner in Lunacy may think that he knows better, but the sum total of their knowledge must be more than he, cocooned in some distant office, could conceivably deploy. The Treasury pays lip service to these principles, but it always expects to know best, and better, certainly, than the two million customers for its tax credits who seem to have been sent the wrong amount of money. These credits were Gordon Brown’s invention, based on an idea that his factotum, Ed Balls, had brought back from America. The tax system, they believed, could be operated like a two-way vacuum cleaner, adapted so that it could blow as well as suck.

We need a fund for the preservation of financial monuments. Sir Nicholas Goodison — successively chairman of the Stock Exchange, the TSB and the National Art Collections Fund — would be just the man to head it. My fund would have saved Cazenove for the nation, and could now get a second chance with a monument familiar to Sir Nicholas: the Stock Exchange itself. As can happen with works of art, it has been given a stay of execution. The two foreign collectors who have cast covetous eyes on it — Euronext in Paris and Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt — are being held off by the Competition Commission.

We should all be in the banknote business. It’s a licence to print money. The Bank of England made £1,618 million out of it last year, and paid every penny of this over to the Treasury, as required by Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Charter Act of 1844. Senior figures in the Bank have long believed that this inequitable Act is due for amendment. Friedrich Hayek, as was his wont, had a better idea. He thought that the Bank should give up its monopoly. A banknote is only a promise to pay, and (so he argued) anyone who wanted to issue promises should be allowed to do so. We would then be free to decide whose promises we trusted. Monopolies were always open to abuse, not least in the hands of the state and its agents. After all, the more money they printed, the more they would make.

Risk assessment is the mantra of our time. You cannot organise a girls’ school hockey match without having to assess the risk that the combatants will bark their knuckles. The baskets of flowers that used to hang outside the Ring of Bells pub in Norton Fitzwarren have been assessed as a risk to passers-by who, if they were more than eight feet tall, might have to step into the road or bump their heads. Trustees of charities and pension funds must assess their risks or take the consequences. Much good all this did for us on the day when City and suburban life developed a new kind of hazard: the risk of being blown up on the way to work. The markets had to assess it and, in their own way, they did. They stumbled but picked themselves up, and by this week they were moving ahead.

Meetings can be a substitute for work, and an expensive one, at that, which is why the thrifty bankers at HSBC had a rule about them. A note had to be kept of every meeting, and the last line of the note would read, ‘This meeting lasted for one hour and 33 minutes and is estimated to have cost £2,822.27p, including the digestive biscuits.’ The biggest item on the bill would be the time of all those present, and they might think twice before incurring it, given the chance that head office would take umbrage. Perhaps HSBC could lend Tony Blair a clerk to help him cost his summit meeting. His own time and his guests’ time would be only the start of it.

Nothing clears the air like a really good family row. Funerals can bring them on. Cousins and aunts, wives and husbands, even, say what they have long since thought and then think of something else to say. What with the nasty accident to Europe’s constitution, and the dawning recognition that the single currency may follow it, everyone can be drawn into the argument. Predictably, Jacques and Tony are blaming each other. It’s your fault, says Jacques, you and your precious rebate — we’ll soon fix that now. Oh, yes, Tony tells him, and what about your greedy farmers? That’s where the money goes. Cut back on the Common Agricultural Policy and we wouldn’t need a rebate. At this point, surely, a light bulb glows over his head. Who needs the CAP, anyway?

The Prime Minister likes the idea of making poverty history. It gives him the chance to forget about Europe and think about Africa. Bob Geldof and his band can know that the lead singer of Ugly Rumours will be with them in the spirit, and so will any number of marginal voters who never warmed to Europe’s new currency and constitution in quite the same way. History itself may not be his strongest subject — only the other day he told us that the United States was the only country to have stood by us in 1940, a remarkable concatenation of errors of fact — and this would explain why he uses it in a dismissive sense: that’s history. So let poverty be history.

A Scottish accountant has his own way of injecting the fear of God into his hearers. This must be one reason why Douglas Flint is finance director of HSBC, and made him the natural choice when his fellow accountants at Cima wanted someone to lecture on pensions. On the day, he came right up to proof. A company running a pension scheme, he said, might as well have a hedge fund on its balance sheet. On the backs of the necks of his City audience, hairs could be seen rising. Hedge funds, they thought: arcane, inherently risky and possibly dodgy — what were their companies doing in this sort of business?