The Big Bang

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-130
Author(s):  
Jack Copley
Keyword(s):  
Stock Exchange ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Court Case ◽  
British Economy ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
The Government ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The Big Bang ◽  
The City ◽  
Desperate Attempt

This chapter examines the 1986 Big Bang liberalization of the London Stock Exchange (LSE), which was crucial in transforming the City of London into a truly global financial centre. This policy was the result of a winding institutional process that began in 1979 when the RPC initiated a case against the LSE for non-competitive practices. While Thatcher initially refused to exempt the LSE from this case, things changed following the government’s implementation of its monetarist experiment: MTFS. MTFS was a strategy to discipline the British economy in a depoliticized manner, by locking the government into years of financial stringency. In order for this strategy to be successful, the government had to meet certain monetary targets, which would justify the painful measures. Yet this plan went awry, plunging the economy into a deep recession while the government failed to hit its monetary targets. To prevent the complete presentational collapse of MTFS, the state began to make massive sales of government debt on the LSE as a way to meet the monetary targets. This in turn made it crucially important that the normal functioning of the LSE was not disrupted by a drawn-out court case. The Thatcher government finally decided to exempt the LSE from this investigation in 1983, which began the countdown to the 1986 Big Bang liberalization. The decision that led to the Big Bang was thus, to a significant extent, a desperate attempt to protect MTFS, which had sought to restructure the British economy in line with global competitive pressures.

Big Bang in the City of London: an intentional revolution or an accident?

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Bellringer ◽  
Ranald Michie
Keyword(s):  
Stock Exchange ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Securities Market ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
Small Change ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

In July 1983 an agreement was reached between the British government and the London Stock Exchange that was to transform the London securities market in October 1986. The result was a revolution that extended all the way from the design of the market to those permitted access to the governance of those who traded. Given the speed of change, it was termed ‘Big Bang’ by contemporaries. As the scale of the transformation became known, politicians were quick to claim credit for what had been achieved. Subsequently, Big Bang has been regarded as one of the crowning achievements of the Conservative government led by Mrs Thatcher, providing the foundation for the City of London's re-emergence as the leading international financial centre. However, only now is evidence emerging of the intentions of those involved at the time rather than as expressed in the light of hindsight, which casts doubt on what they were seeking to achieve, whether viewed from the perspective of either the politicians or those in charge of the Stock Exchange. Instead, the longer-term pressure for change in the London securities market, the chain reaction caused by abolition of fixed-commission charges, and the proactive role of the Bank of England appear to be of greater significance. What an examination of the process leading up to Big Bang in 1986 reveals is the complexity of political decision involving the financial sector and the danger of unforeseen consequences. One small change can create a tipping point if the result is to remove an essential element within a complex system.

scholarly journals From Big Bang to Brexit: The City of London and the Discursive Power of Finance

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172098571
Author(s):  
Scott James ◽  
Hussein Kassim ◽  
Thomas Warren
Keyword(s):  
Big Bang ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Business Power ◽  
Financial Power ◽  
Discursive Power ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
The Eu

This article aims to generate new insights into the City’s influence during the Brexit negotiations. Integrating theories of discursive institutionalism and business power, we set out to analyse the dynamic ‘discursive power’ of finance. From this perspective, a key source of the City’s influence historically has been a powerful strategic discourse about London’s role as Europe’s leading global financial centre. This was strengthened following the financial crisis to emphasise its contribution to the ‘real’ economy and emerging regulatory threats from the EU. We argue that Brexit challenges the City’s discursive power by removing ‘ideational constraints’ on acceptable policy discourse, and undermining the ‘discursive co-production’ of financial power by government and industry. By encouraging financial actors to re-evaluate their interests, this has contributed to increasing discursive fragmentation and incoherence. Evidence for this comes from the City’s ambiguous policy preferences on Brexit, and the emergence of a rival pro-Brexit ‘discursive coalition’.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....

Land of Hope and Enterprise

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Alex Brummer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Financial Crisis ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
Eu Referendum ◽  
The Uk ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

This chapter examines the contribution of recognized activities that make the UK economy, such as the progress in research, pharmaceuticals, technology, software, and innovation that can be traced back to the intellectual powerhouses of UK's institutions of higher learning. It recounts the UK's love–hate relationship with the City of London, wherein the banks are still blamed for the financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the subsequent stagnation and fall in incomes. It also cites finance as the highest UK earner of overseas income and is a magnet for international institutions. The chapter describes London as the biggest financial centre outside New York and has attracted even greater numbers of skilled financial traders since the EU referendum result of 2016. It explains how the UK financial sector accommodated trading, provided credit, and raised new capital for troubled firms and those seeking post-Covid-19 opportunities.

scholarly journals CONRAD AND THE COMIC TURN

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Kerr
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
East End ◽  
City Of London ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
The City

Of his nineteen years as a sailor, from 1874 to 1894, Joseph Conrad actually worked on ships for ten years and eight months, of which just over eight years were spent at sea, including nine months as a passenger (Najder 161–62). During these nomadic years, London was the place to which he returned again and again to seek his next berth, staying in a series of sailors’ homes, lodgings, and boarding houses. How did he spend his time, a single man with no family and few friends, whose main occupation was waiting? He recalled, in the preface toThe Secret Agent, “solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days” (7). Ford Madox Ford says that Conrad knew all the bars around Fenchurch Street (which links the financial centre of the City of London to Whitechapel and the East End) from his days of waiting for a ship. Returning to the area later in life, according to Ford's slightly improbable memory, he “became at once the city-man gentleman-adventurer with an eye for a skirt,” who “could tell you where every husky earringed fellow with a blue, white-spotted handkerchief under his arm was going to. . . .” (Joseph Conrad116, 117). The reality of these London sojourns was probably less romantic, most of the time. But there was one place where a sailor ashore, without much money, could always go for company and entertainment: the music-hall.

The City of London and the Politics of ‘Invisibles’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Balance Of Payments ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter considers the resurgence of the City of London as an international financial centre in the late twentieth century. It highlights the role played by a campaign to promote the revival of the City as a post-sterling international financial centre. The Committee on Invisible Exports campaigned for the recognition of the City’s contribution to Britain’s balance of payments through its ‘invisible earnings’, and argued that this could be increased by reducing impediments on its activities. The invisibles campaign was a distinct product of the post-war preoccupation with the balance of payments, which challenged the fundamental belief, embedded in economic policy since the war, that the route to national prosperity was in expanding industrial production. The campaign sought to reconceptualize Britain as a historic commercial and financial, rather than industrial, economy. In doing so it undercut a core principle on which the social democratic political–economic project was based.

scholarly journals XIII. Further Particulars of Thomas Norton, and of State Proceedings in Matters of Religion, in the Years 1581 and 1582

Archaeologia ◽  
1855 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Durrant Cooper
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Government ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

Your recent communication to the Society has drawn their attention to some facts relating to Thomas Norton, which were not known to me when I wrote the Memoir for the Shakespeare Society; and, as it is clearly proved, both by your communication and by documents in the State Paper Office, that the author of the first three acts of our earliest tragedy in blank verse was also the citizen grocer and the active and zealous Member for the City of London in 1571, and again from 1572 to 1582, who was declared to be “a man wise, bold, and eloquent,” and to have addressed the Members “in his accustomed manner of natural eloquence,” it may not be uninteresting to notice some of the State transactions in which Norton was engaged in the years 1581 and 1582, when the renewed movement was made against the Catholics by the Parliament and the Government.

The Financial Services Act

2021 ◽  
pp. 131-148
Author(s):  
Jack Copley
Keyword(s):  
Financial Services ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Financial Governance ◽  
The Government ◽  
Government Body ◽  
Informal Relations ◽  
The City

This chapter analyses the 1986 Financial Services Act (FSA), which complemented the Big Bang by instituting a light-touch and arm’s-length form of regulation of the City of London. In 1981, the government commissioned a legal academic—Gower—to investigate Britain’s financial regulations and make recommendations on future amendments. Gower proposed a system of self-regulation that would be directly supervised by a government body. This form of state oversight was met with disapproval by the government and Bank. However, the impending Big Bang changed policymakers’ opinions. This radical liberalization would invite global actors to operate in the City, which in turn necessitated the creation of an impartial and legally enforced system of rules. Nevertheless, the Thatcher government was concerned that Gower’s proposals would make them politically responsible for future financial crises, while the Bank worried that their informal relations with the City would be interrupted by government meddling. As such, the government and Bank worked to depoliticize Gower’s plans by inserting a private body between the government and the City, and thus insulate policymakers from legitimacy problems that would result from financial crises. FSA can thus be understood as an attempt to create a depoliticized framework of financial governance that would simultaneously provide a clear legal framework for Britain’s newly liberalized financial system and protect the state authorities from the political backlash derived from this financialized pattern of growth.

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