CITY AND SUBURBAN
What are the wild waves saying? Stand by for the tear-jerking scene
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
We have it from that old salt of the naval patrols, Sub-Lieutenant Lawson, R.N. (retired), that a free country in a free world is always at risk from high winds and rough seas. He was telling his party so last week. Less elegantly, earlier Chancellors used to complain that they had been blown off course. This Chancellor had in fact navigated neatly into a false calm, allowing the party to confer in the brief interval between the hoisting of interest rates and the collapse of stock markets. Now the seas are rough again, and the right question was first posed by that plaintive child whom Dickens conjured up in Dombey and Son: what are the wild waves saying? What they were saying to him was that, knowing the author's form, we could only be a matter of chapters away from a truly tear-jerking deathbed scene in which he could play a leading role. Even so, it was an instructive response, and he did better to ask the question than to grouse at the weather or assert that it bore no relation to the sunny conditions on his own particular stretch of beach. In fact, though the storm in the markets blew up suddenly, the forecast had been deteriorating for a while. Two months ago, when London shares were testing their previous records and the FT-SE Index had climbed above 2,400, I was voicing my doubts CA market with two or three hundred points of fiz2 and bub- bles': City and Suburban, 19 August.) Now, two or more nearly three hundred points down, the fizz has gone flat and the bubbles have gone pop.
Previous page
