Cobra in the Bath by Miles Morland

Author:Miles Morland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408863695
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

*Kuhn, Loeb and J. P. Morgan were once the two dominant firms on Wall Street. In the first half of the twentieth century KL had transformed America. Two partners, Otto Kahn and Jacob Schiff, had been the main financiers of the US railroad system and another, Paul Warburg, created the Federal Reserve. When I worked there it was living off its reputation, and later it suffered the ignominy of a forced merger with what its partners saw as the upstart firm of Lehman Brothers.

18

The Garden Shed

I now needed to earn some money or I would find myself having to knock at the door of Morgan Stanley or Merrill Lynch and ask for a job. I thought about becoming a writer. The Man Who Broke Out of the Bank helped to plug the hole in our bank balance so we could survive a little longer, and I did odd pieces of journalism, which brought in a tiny amount of extra money. I was astonished to find out how badly journalists are paid. People who have worked in the financial world are always astonished to find out what people who work in other areas are paid.

I thought of other things to do. I have always been obsessed by stock markets. Once you get to understand a little about them they can become absorbing, like an infuriatingly complex game whose rules change as soon as you think you’ve learned them. They are about big emotions – fear, greed and panic – and have little to do with numbers. My other obsession is being bloody-minded. I hate being told what to do, which could explain why boarding school was such a failure, and I love doing the opposite of what other people think is a sensible idea. Maybe one day I shall write a book called The Expert Is Always Wrong. Because experts are experts in what worked yesterday, they are challenged and proved wrong by something new which comes along and upsets the world in which they got their doctorate. This is why none of them foresaw the end of communism or the advent of the Arab Spring.

When I was at First Boston I had become involved in what later came to be called emerging markets. In the 1980s few non-anglophone countries had functioning stock markets; places like Spain, Austria, Portugal, Greece and Finland had markets with one or two stocks that traded very occasionally. Such markets had become moribund during years of nationalisation and socialist orthodoxy, but as privatisation became the way of the future, they would be needed again. It was apparent that pioneer investors, people like George Soros and Jim Rogers, who did their research and invested early in these fledgling markets, later did extremely well when the markets were discovered by other investors. I was intrigued. What was the next set of markets waiting to be discovered? I needed to do some research.

Shortly after the Walk Guislaine and I sold our grown-up house on a London square and moved

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