The gold-diggers of Europe 1999

In July 1996 the senior management of Morgan Stanley in London - seized perhaps with a sense of awe at the approaching millennium and an urge to display their own capacity for the vision thing - sat down and wrote plans for the firm's 15 or so main business lines in Europe, projecting headcount, capital, revenues and pre-tax profit for the years up to and including 2000. The reaction of some of the firm's senior executives in the US and Asia was, to put it kindly, sceptical. The Europeans were surely dreaming. They couldn't possibly achieve such ambitious targets when everyone knew the real growth story was in emerging markets, in Asia or in the US equity boom.

But in most of those businesses Morgan Stanley had reached its targets for 2000 by the second half of 1997: the remaining laggards hit their 2000 projections by the end of June this year....