T
he French had just withdrawn from the occupied Saarland
and the Eurodollar had been born and in1958 the Deutsche Mark be- came fully convertible. The London Foreign Exchange market came to life. In 1961 the Berlin Wall ap- peared and I left the bank to become a broker until 1964 which saw the start of the influx of American banks into the City. Their arrival gave companies the ability to borrow money on a fixed term basis- prior to this nearly 100% had been on overdraft and gave me the chance to join the First National Bank of Boston. My ―line‖ boss in Boston who had started as a messenger riding the bullion vans, in which during Prohibition he transported booze from the bank‘s vaults to the speakeasies, was a Lebanese Christian and was every- one‘s buddy, well known to most of the banks in Europe. It was a couple of years later while we were trying to find a buyer for three lorry loads of Nazi gold hidden in Austria that he introduced me to a New York broking firm, owned by an Irishman with nearly all his dozen or so brokers being Italian Americans. We walked into his dealing room to be confronted by these waist-coated men, most wearing trilby hats and openly displaying shoulder holsters. I thought I was on Candid Camera -I still do not know whether this was a big spoof or not. Anyhow, to cut a long story short we never found any acceptable ―dodgy‖ buyers of this bullion whose ―owners‖ lived in the
Middle East. After several weeks one of the major Swiss banks bought the lot for US$33 an ounce and arranged for it to cross the border and be smelted down to become more acceptable. In those days gold was still fixed at US$ 35 per ounce 1967 saw the Wilson Government devaluation of
Sterling from 2.80 to 2.40 and in that year I became the first commercial banker to spend a few hours in the Dealing Room of the Bank of England prior to a visit to the Bank of Canada and then spending three days in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Before going I bought 2 three piece suits from Take Six for £40.
I
n the 1970s there was still no sign of sexual harassment
legislation on the horizon, thank goodness, but what we did see was the decimalisation and floating of Sterling after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement and the Pound then collapsing to US$1.57. I signed a 5 year loan/swap agree- ment with ICI which covered 1 ½ pages of type. Nearly 30 years later I signed one which had 186 pages.
O
ur bank had working relations with a group of banks
associated with the Vatican Bank with bases in Italy, Switzerland and New York who had billions of dollars in foreign exchange contracts with banks in London and other financial cities when these ancillary banks eventually collapsed.
27
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