Tony Golding

To the outsider the City is bewilderingly complex. Not a place, but a set of interrelated activities: investment banking, corporate stockbroking, fund management, venture capital and all the paraphernalia that links funding to business.
In his book Tony Golding writes a history of the City, describes how it works, and explains the psychology of its participants. Such a colossal accumulation of wealth in the hands of so few can only have profound implications for the ordinary investor, and as Golding shows, it does.

Far from being a wallflower the City these days is the disk jockey. Companies dance to its tune and the ultimate sources of funding (you and I) are not even invited to the party. Yet the analysts, bankers and fund managers occupying centre stage are victims of circumstance too. Their behaviour is apparently perverse, but actually, says Golding, it is entirely logical.

To keep alive the conceit of steady progress, so essential to executive bonuses and fund manager remuneration, analysts drip-feed information to investors and the media using techniques to maximise the good news and bury the bad. It's a process akin to political spin sanitised by the label 'investor relations'.

These are a few of the more lurid insights Golding supplies into the "great expectation machine" and the characters that run it. With under performance, dodgy analysis and greed the norm, and the implications that has for small investors, savers and employees, the reality of the City is clearly flawed.

Changes will be made, lawyers stalking investment banks and governments scrutinising the business of finance will make sure of it, but Golding's book, part manual and part analysis, shows it took us centuries to get here. Fiddling with the rulebook is unlikely to revolutionise the game. At least in "telling it like it is", Tony Golding gives the determined reader and private investor the opportunity to make more sense of the City, warts and all.… (mais)