The wages of fear
MARKETS, so we learned at Sir Patrick Sergeant's knee, are ruled by greed and fear. Greed fosters financial disasters: fear brings them into the open. How salutary, then, to have Alex Murray's Great Finan- cial Disasters (Arthur Barker, £5.95), trac- ing the history of deceit and self-deceit back to Amenhotep and King Solomon. Mr Murray moves at a cracking pace from the South Sea Bubble to the equally inflated Keith Hunt, the 21-stone commod- ity wizard of Warwick, who one May day suddenly went pop — leaving investors with no trace either of £10 million of their money, or of Mr Hunt himeself. Hard to hide that globular form? Not a bit of it: my theory is that Mr Hunt simply booked himself into Forest Mere. Mr Murray's chosen disaster mongers include the matchless Grigor McGrigor, who in the greedy days of London's first foreign loan boom, 160 years ago, thought bigger and greedier than anyone. Others promoted loans to Latin American republics, most of which did not pay. McGrigor, cutting out the middleman, floated a £200,000 load for a Latin American republic which did not exist. Poyais, he called it. Mr Murray says that after the coup, McGrigor was not heard of again. Indeed he was: he is buried, with honour, next to Simon Bolivar the Liberator. Latin American debtors know who their friends are.
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