News in the parental bedroom; he loved all the burnt-out tanks and lorries and the sand reminded him of Egypt.
‘When can I go to Egypt and have Coca Cola and crips (sic) again?’ he asked.
Eight o’clock was his putative bed time, but not a target ever attained.
I have no recollection of the end of the news, only of being shaken awake by my affectionate wife, Rika, with a requirement to expel Gen back to his quarters. The television was still on. I attempted to cling to consciousness for a little while in the vain hope of getting lucky, but the telephone went. Knowing it would be a Japanese colleague freshly unsqueezed from his morning train with an earnest desire to talk cathode ray tubes, I went to sleep.
Friday’s morning meeting would normally have been greeted with more enthusiasm than most. In this one, however, the news was that German truck sales were weakening, the dollar was basing, and East Germans were going on strike. Dullsburg, Schleswig-Holstein.
I battled manfully to stave off sleep as half a dozen stock analysts talked us through their ideas of the day by taking frantic notes. Later I rang up my Japanese clients and bored them rigid with what I had heard. Unsurprisingly I received no orders that day.
Talking to the Japanese is an activity that requires specialists at the best of times, because their English is so dire, and because of a prejudice exacerbated by the likes of Clive James that they have no sense of humour and are just a tiny little bit mad. Madness cannot be held against them, after all, the British are palpably a little bit mad too, and in my opinion a degree of madness is healthy. Imagine how awful it would be to be Swiss.
The perception that the Japanese have no sense of humour is wrong. These days even Clive James laughs with them rather than at them, the sneer replaced by something approaching affection. Humour is language based and sadly a lot gets lost in translation, so proving my thesis that the Japanese can be witty is tricky, but take it from me, it’s not unknown. Having said that, Japanese fund managers are as dull as English fund managers.
My job was made doubly difficult by the mess their financial institutions had got themselves into in believing that their stock and property markets would rise forever. Despite falling by a third, Tokyo’s stock market continued to look very expensive by Western standards, and anomalies remained, such as the grounds of the Emperor’s Palace continuing to be worth more than the state of California. Should anybody undo the bits of string and sticky tape holding the whole thing together, the collapse would be spectacular. Preventing this was where Japanese financial firepower was concentrated, so there was little spare cash for investing overseas and enriching the likes of me.
I assumed that my employers did not understand this. After all, they had taken me on a mere eight months previously when such things should have been pretty obvious. Very intelligent people rarely get to the top in stockbroking because they offend too many stupid people on the way up, and end up being stabbed in the back. This could be true of any profession – politics springs to mind. Our managers at Merrill’s were all Americans in their fifties who had got to where they were by offending nobody.
The grandfatherly head of sales, and the grandmotherly head of research, had told me when I arrived that it would not be too long before the Japanese became a force to be reckoned with in European equities. Their experience of the Japanese and of European equities was garnered selling US equities to American private investors for thirty years in Peoria, Pa. I hoped that they would keep thinking bullishly about Japan a little longer, because my secret personal view was pretty cataclysmic. The Japanese were in such shit that it would be perhaps five years before levels of activity made a decent recovery, but with luck it would be a couple of years before Merrill Lynch realised this, so that I could continue to earn more than the Chancellor for producing next to nothing. Merrills would continue to travel hopefully rather than arrive. By the time they realised that with me they would never arrive, I would be on my way to yet another new firm.
Selling on hope had been a speciality of mine. I speak fluent Japanese, therefore it was assumed that I would be able to communicate very efficiently with Japanese investors and persuade them to do their investment through me. In five years I had worked for five companies. The first three, Laurence Prust, Vickers da Costa, and Scrimgeour Vickers, have all been closed down by the foreign banks who bought them. I was the eternal trainee, always promising lots, but in terms of revenues delivering nothing. Each time I came under pressure to produce, I changed jobs – switching from selling UK equities to the Japanese to selling Japanese equities to the UK, then back again to selling UK equities to the Japanese, then finally Europe to the Japanese. I was well into my third year as a stockbroker before getting my first order, yet my salary nearly doubled each of those years.
I started on £11,000 at Laurence Prust, and left them eight months later for £17,000 at Vickers da Costa, which became part of Citicorp Scrimgeour Vickers. Almost exactly a year later there was a massive storm in London. I cycled to work, ducking the fallen trees, and was one of the few to make it in. My boss was one of the others. I had announced my intention of transferring internally from the Vickers da Costa bit, where I was a trainee Japanese equity salesman, to become a trainee UK equities salesman in the Scrimgeour Kemp Gee bit, selling to the Japanese. My idea was that I would be one of few Brits able to talk to his clients in their native language. The Wall of Money was coming.
My boss tried to dissuade me. He pointed out that commission rates were lower in the UK. I hadn’t quite worked out the direct link between commission earned on the one hand, and salary and bonus received on the other. These things were just paid to me, without my understanding why. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that my failing to spot this crucial relationship was responsible for my failure to become obscenely rich. If only I’d stuck with Japanese equities, or better still, gone into Japanese warrants.
My boss gave me a £10,000 pay rise. It was Friday 17th October 1987. That afternoon certain perturbations began to occur over on Wall Street, and by Monday, markets worldwide were in free fall. I still made the transfer to Scrimgeours, but they paid £10,000 more for me than they would have.
At this stage, I had never had an order as such. I had offered stock once.
‘Where is it?’ I was asked. This had seemed a funny question at the time. Why did the fund manager care where it was? The back office would cope with that. ‘Locked up in some bank vault somewhere, I suppose,’ I answered.
‘No, where is it?’
‘I don’t know, I’ll go and ask someone,’ I volunteered helpfully, and leant across to ask a colleague, who informed me that ‘where’, in City parlance means ‘how much’.
At this stage in my career, having never received an order, and not understanding that ‘where’ can mean ‘how much’, I was worth £27,000 a year to my employer. By the time I had three years on my C.V. it was a bit difficult to disguise the fact that I might actually have accumulated some experience, so rather than promising what I myself would become, I promised what my client base would become. The Japanese had scarcely diversified a fraction of their mammoth portfolios into Europe, as so far it had all gone to the US, but the great Wall of Money was confidently predicted. The terrific thing about the Wall of Money was that nobody knew when it would arrive. You had to be prepared, because by the time it did arrive the Japanese, with their notorious love of long-term relationships, would only give business to the brokers who they knew and trusted. Therefore you had to employ Jim Parton. The consequences of missing this bonanza were too terrible to contemplate, so even if for the moment I produced little in the way of commission, a great day would come, it was imagined, when I and my team would support the rest of whatever firm I worked for.
So far, of course, the Wall of Money had never arrived and to me at least it was obvious that it never would, but I felt pretty safe. Management at Merrill Lynch was as chaotic as at P & D. Since my arrival, Mike Hewitt, plus the nice grandfatherly head of sales, who had been my direct boss, and the rotund granny from the Bronx with the sexy anklet, had all gone on to different things and whilst Merrill Lynch New York or Tokyo might have sound views on Japan’s economy available for dissemination, inter-office rivalry would prevent them ever reaching my new boss’s ears and poisoning his view of my long-term worth to London.