Visited my old patch last night, the City of London, where I lived before settling south. The occasion was historian
Niall Ferguson's talk in St Paul's Cathedral about Siegmund Warburg [1902-1982], founder of the bank of the same name (surely you've heard of Siegmund's?). Ferguson offered a brief overview of banking then and now. It seems that maximizing shareholder value wasn't at the top of Warburg's agenda. There was a large audience, some of whom may have been attracted by the prospect of banker bonus bashing.
The queue to get into the cathedral was a strange double ringed affair, almost like water circling a drain. It was very difficult to locate the end of it; confused people struggled to find meaning.
You may recall that last year a Goldman Sachs executive offered the following sermon from the same pulpit: "The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is a recognition of self-interest.... We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all." As Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein
d later put it, supposedly in Lennonesque irony, they are doing God's work.
Moving to his creatures great and small division, below is a hurried snap of an unidentified visitor in our garden. My wife submitted it to her city mice coworkers, who take a wary interest in the mysterious far off countryside she escapes to every night. Current opinion is that it's a stoat.
In other rural news, a squirrel dives for a juicy berry before an interloper - perhaps a stoat? - can get to it
and farmers harvest Weetabix
