By Lucy Kenningham
Bulls are not regularly seen on the streets of the Square Mile, especially recently. It has been all too easy on my recent travels to find people casting their eyes downward when asked about the City’s prospects, as if the irritatingly grey July skies are dimming optimism before the summer holidays.
What’s interesting is that often these conversations take a different turn when I ask about their own businesses. The eyes light up, the downbeat visage replaced with a slight smile. Some version of “well, actually, we’re doing alright” tends to follow, from bank bosses to the founders of AIM-listed businesses.
Are we too hard on ourselves? Sometimes, perhaps. The media has famously been blamed on more than one occasion, by figures including the City minister, for talking British business down in some way.
But that doesn’t always hold up. It’s not our fault, for instance, that London’s markets continue to undervalue successful businesses listed here, at least compared to overseas peers. Firms on the capital’s equity markets see a price to earning ratio far lower than Wall Street, for instance.
Could the problem lie as much with the infrastructure around our listed companies, perhaps? Ocado is not necessarily my idea of a perfect stock – it has been ‘jam tomorrow’ for more than a decade, and the sandwich is still a little bit bare – but do we have the ecosystem around firms like that to really get under the bonnet of them, and understand their value? Tech leaders regularly tell me that they won’t list in London not because of any fiddly regulation, but because investors don’t understand them and the analysts to translate don’t exist on this side of the Atlantic.
The good news is that can be fixed. There’s value to be had in London, and rarely is that left on the shelf for long.
Red, white and blue
A proper marmalade-dropper, as they say, in a column by the economist Sam Bowman the other day. GDP growth in the States has been 47 per cent faster since 2010 than the UK, and currently the average American could stop working on September 27 each year and still be richer than the average Brit. It’s time we were honest about what low growth looks like – and it doesn’t look pretty.
Blue sky deals
Rail strikes continue to bedevil the capital’s recovery from the pandemic, albeit giving hybrid workers an excuse not to cough up for a day return. No sector is being more badly hit than hospitality. So it was a welcome message I received from my girlfriend flagging a £15 steak frites deal at Hawksmoor, designed only to wash its face but give the restaurant enough custom to keep employees’ hours up. We may need more of such imaginative thinking.
Rebrand?
Bristol’s rugby side launched their fixture list this week by asking ordinary folk around town to help identify the badges of their rivals. Highlights included Harlequins – or ‘like a circus guy with a samurai sword’ – and Leicester Tigers, otherwise known as the “Angry Jaguars.” Premiership rugby is in a sorry financial state off the pitch but the product on the field is genuinely high-quality, notably more exciting than seen at test match level. It appears, though, some branding work is in order.
A real life epic from a master of the genre
Some of you may have come across the fantastic non-fiction writer Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the IRA history Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, the brilliant biography of the Sackler dynasty and their best-known product, Oxycontin. Both are superb books but for the summer holiday perhaps another of his works is a better choice – I’ve just finished The Snakehead, a remarkable tale of an unassuming, grey-haired Chinese restaurant owner in New York by the name of Sister Ping, who despite her persona was a key part of the human smuggling industry in the 1990s. It reads like a thriller, but in highlighting the desperation of those wanting a better life, it’s perhaps helpful context in our current battle over immigration. It is, as they say, never blackand white.
