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the Stock Exchange to embark on a time-consuming comparison of world stock exchange systems in order to justify exemption and, therefore, protection of the jobbing system. The implication was that special treatment could not be justified as the single capacity jobbing system was unique to the London Stock Exchange. Asked in 2018 whether he recalled Ridley’s letter, Goodison
on the London Stock Exchange. To be clear, companies were not just de-nationalized, they were transferred into the hands of City investors (something I will return to later). Similar responses were given when Lawson was asked about the release of exchange controls, changes in corporation taxes, stamp duty, dividend payment controls and so on. Whether or not he referred back to his City experiences, he applied a financial market logic to his decisions. One of his great concerns on a budget day was ‘what is the financial market reaction going to
The 1980s financial revolution placed the UK at the vanguard of neoliberal free market reforms and is celebrated on the Right as a high point in capitalism. Usually, it is understood as the inevitable outcome of New Right ideas, global economic shifts, new technologies and free-flowing capital. Using archival sources and dozens of in-depth interviews, Barrett brings to life the people and processes involved in the making of the financial revolution. Survival Capitalism demonstrates the high stakes for capitalist institutions and unfolding responses to existential threats and opportunities. It offers insights into struggles and alternative possibilities and shows just how contingent outcomes were. Ultimately, reforms were driven by the authorities but shaped significantly by City practitioners as they navigated and contested change, informed by their cultures and traditions. Although financial reforms are associated with the Thatcher government’s supply-side reforms, Survival Capitalism shows how the Government’s quest for autonomy and monetary credibility, when faced with problems of selling debt, impacted the stock market mechanism. It therefore exposes the macroeconomic concerns which drove reforms in parallel with microeconomic drivers. The two converged, but this focus affirms that international capital and new technologies were not merely catalysts for change; they were harnessed by the nation state to support the domestic agenda. By restoring intent to this history, Survival Capitalism offers new perspectives on Thatcherism and its legacies. The focus on people and processes de-mystifies the perception of the ‘inevitable’ march of market forces and explains the survival of the cultures of capitalism.
Writing in 1901 , the financial journalist and author Charles Duguid mused that the physical expansion of the London Stock Exchange over the course of the nineteenth century – from James Peacock's original basilical building to Thomas Allason's mid-century glass-domed structure to the construction in the 1880s of John Jenkins Cole's massive eastern addition – provided a concrete, physical measure of the institution's growing economic importance. ‘Even as the architecture of a nation is an index of its character,’ he wrote, ‘that of the Stock
be an excellent business in Africa and the Middle East. This success was used in August 1980 to persuade investors on the London Stock Exchange to invest ISC OTE SpA (R. Rossi) ISC Laben SpA (M. Gerevini) ISC Educational Systems (L. Schick) Cardion Electronics (Sir David Checketts, managing director) ISC International Technologies Ltd Figure 2.1 The ISC structure in 1986 ISC Elmer SpA (G. Paladini) ISC Electronic Systems (Ian Ball) ISC Aerospace (E. Torrez) ISC SpA (Dr. F. Samoggia) ISC Technologies (C. Ivy) (C. Ivy, chairman) ISC International
the country there was widespread concern about the effects of newly unleashed international capital on the United Kingdom’s capital markets. Following the collapse of the fixed rate Bretton Woods monetary system in the early 1970s, by the end of the decade it was widely feared that international capital would soon bypass the London Stock Exchange, the UK’s central securities market. Anxiety that the UK could
primary market for private sector securities Two markets exist in London. The main market is the London Stock Exchange (LSE), which deals in the securities of established companies. A second market exists for the trading of securities of smaller, growing companies. This market is the Alternative Investments Market (AIM), which is owned and operated by the LSE
& Co. responded to the Big Bang deregulation of the financial sector, using social networks and inherited practices to navigate what was an ostensibly technical and modernising revolution. The Thatcher administration’s reform of the London Stock Exchange was an economic enterprise intended to end restrictive practices, open the City to competition and, as discussed in Chapter 1 , secure the mechanism for selling gilts. On the
), in ‘The shape of the stock exchange is shapelessness’, disrupts the presumed histories of spaces at the centre of financing colonial expansion as qualitatively different than the present day. Rather, this chapter offers a succinct account of how the London Stock Exchange, at its physical creation as a marketplace, forged a space permissive of violence and promoting extraction. Crucially, the chapter locates the London Stock Exchange at the heart of financing colonial extraction and redistributing the wealth gains. In sharp contrast to the popular view of British
triumphalism saturated British social life: from the Porschedriving yuppies of the deregulated City of London Stock Exchange to an increasingly rootless working class aspiring to participation in Britain’s new property-owning, share-owning democracy even as nationalised industry and the welfare state were dismantled around their ears. Film culture was not slow to respond to such a perilous state of affairs – numerous films, (many of which were made with the financial support of Channel 4’s Film Four label) despairing at the depths of social injustice, intolerance and hatred