‘I am juicy,’ she repeated, and the truth gradually began to dawn that that was what she wanted to be called. Nobody could quite cope, and variants on Jose and Jessie were tried. It turned out that her name was Giusseppina, or Giussi for short.
Giussi was from the Merrill Lynch MBA training scheme in New York, and therefore knew next to nothing about economics, companies or broking their shares. She would be joining us on sales, but first she was to pick up what she could by observing the work being done by dealers, salesmen and analysts. In due course she would replace a nice, clean-cut young Dane entrusted to us until a few weeks previously, by which time his sincerity and enthusiasm had got us down.
Giussi had a lovely, naïve, doe-eyed way of asking questions, and of perching herself on the end of one’s desk in a way that most men, mesmerised, could not resist. ‘I am Giussi. Please let me revolve on your desk. I want to learn something,’ she’d say to the traders, charmingly oblivious to the double entendre.
Henry and Charlie were soon eating out of her lap, or would have been if they had got half a chance, and even Alick found time away from harassing the American senior management and the research department to help her with her questions.
My Japanese clients remained disquietingly quiet. Alick told me he’d discussed it with his boss, and that it was seventy per cent likely that I would be posted to Tokyo where business was still believed to be brisk (so I told my bosses). Rika would be delighted to be nearer home. I had severe misgivings about twelve-hour working days and proximity to my mother-in-law, although a nice tax free salary through Guernsey would always be welcome.
The next day I drove to work because it was raining. My Citroen BX 16 valve was not, perhaps, the petrolhead’s car of choice, but it went to 135mph and from nought to sixty in 6.9 seconds. A nice little runabout in London. As it was a company car I never cleaned it and the insides had eight months of biscuit and crisp crumbs pressed into the crushed velour of the back seat. In Camberwell there isn’t quite the pressure to wash a car that you get in, say, Purley.
I parked it in a very handy parking place just outside the office where the workmen had obliterated the yellow lines.
In the morning meeting we were told that, despite the dramatic pictures of burning oil in Kuwait, the world was awash with the stuff, and its price was likely to weaken for the next six months. Merrill Lynch had predicted a collapse in the oil price almost as soon as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. At the time, the almost universal view was that oil would jump further from forty dollars to sixty or even a hundred, not fall back to twenty dollars as we were saying. It was very pleasing for a salesman to have told his clients something that actually turned out to be true: oil down = inflation down = interest rates down = markets up.
That had been twenty-five per cent ago, and my clients hadn’t bought a thing.
The Japanese have a pathological distrust of stockbrokers having been so comprehensively and continuously legged over by the likes of Nomura, so if a broker comes on with a well argued story, inevitably they assume that there must be some sort of catch. In early 1990, the Japanese had been very big buyers of Europe just before the Saddam crash. Because of their losses from this, some had gone as far as to ban their fund managers from investing at all during the war. They made the same mistake during the 1987 crash, thereby missing an opportunity to buy at the bottom.
Xenophobic politicians and protectionists who have complained about the ravages Japanese manufacturers have inflicted on our industry should reflect gratefully for a moment that Japanese investors have always been available to buy at the top, and sell at the bottom of our financial markets, which I suspect redresses the trade imbalance amply. (Not, of course, that the sophisticated and professional British and American fund managers with all their fabulously expensive and complex methods of prediction did any better in the run up to the Gulf War. They were just as scared to buy anything as the ‘amateur’ Japanese.)
The moral of the story for an investor has been to watch what the Japanese do, and do the opposite, although I am not sure how this investment strategy operates in the new era in which they may have no spare money to invest overseas.
After lunch, Wall Street opened strongly. Somebody from the New York office rang in with the information that there was massive buying of US shares and the largest number of small buy orders for four years. I called some of my clients but couldn’t panic them into purchasing anything. I ought to have been telling them to sell, as small orders = private individuals = unsophisticated investors = top of the market. There was no point though: as they hadn’t bought at the bottom they could hardly sell at the top.
At the next morning meeting I passed the time doing a survey of Hermès ties. Six out of nine men had them, a not untypical score. Giussi had a Hermès scarf. The three without them were myself, the electronics analyst, making a rare appearance at the meeting to tell us about one of his companies, and an exponent of the dismal science of economics from the bond department. Analysts would compromise their credibility if they dressed fashionably. They need to look gritty and industrial, as if they went to Northern grammar schools. It is always curious to see men on £100,000 a year wearing polyester shirts and ties with gravy stains down them, but it undoubtedly helps clients take them seriously. There must be an Old Etonian ex-Guardsman working as an analyst somewhere in the City, but I have yet to meet him.
By chance I was wearing Armani, bought for me several Christmases ago by Rika in a last ditch attempt to smarten me up, so I felt that I could announce the results of the survey without my own dishevelled appearance being the butt of too many unkind jokes, or being suspected of taking the piss.
This sparked an animated conversation about whether you could get Hermès ties cheaper at JFK, Heathrow or closer to source at Charles de Gaulle; I advocated Hong Kong’s excellent forgeries. American employment numbers looming up the very next day no less, temporarily took a back seat, despite the presence of the dismal scientist to explain them to us. Charlie said that he knew a little man who could turn a soiled Hermès tie inside out or back to front or whatever was necessary, and re-stitch it, as new, for as little as thirty-five pounds.
I got three orders, all about £100,000, so it could be said that I was busy. It didn’t really compare with the nine million pounds order Henry had been working for Barings over the last few days, or the two million pounds sell order in a defence contractor Alick had been eking out into the market for a Middle Eastern client who was no doubt in a position to make some clever guesses as to who would replace all that hardware lost in the Gulf War. One day the Japanese in London would be BIG in European equities and the market would tremble every time it got wind of an order emanating from Jim Parton. Sadly not yet. Still, Merrill Lynch was there for the long term.
Giussi’s father turned out to be the president of the chamber of commerce in Naples. It was only a few days into the job and she got her first order: not bad for a beginner. She hadn’t associated the company name – Daimler Benz – with the maker of the upmarket motor cars, but with half a dozen panting men helping her it was soon traded.
It was one of my duties to do the shopping at Tesco having picked up Gen. I liked the Brixton Tesco; they had lots of ethnic food, although Rika still had to travel to a Japanese shop to get the right brands of soy sauce and sesame oil.
As a stockbroker I could keep the shopping process under control, because I was fully conversant with the tricks supermarkets play to improve profits, mainly because in City presentations the heads of Tesco and Sainsbury’s boast about them. Tricks like stashing high margin products at the end of the aisles. As you slow to go round them, you see Blanquette de Veau Provençale aux Champignons (Medallions of Tasty Veal in a Savoury Mushroom sauce, Provence style, serves two to four). And because it seems like a good idea at the time, you buy it.
Gen always insisted on driving the trolley, so at the end of most aisles I was usually apologising for a collision, rather than loading up with high margin products. Gen was still not a victim of the great capitalist conspiracy, until, that is, the checkout counter where Tesco cynically stashed all the Crunchies and Smarties, knowing that harassed parents are more likely to give in to their children than cause a scene.
My skiing holiday was on the way to being