The gold-diggers of Europe 1999
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The gold-diggers of Europe 1999

You've heard of America's forty-niners, well these are the ninety-niners, preparing for the gold-rush when Europe's single currency rolls into play in January. A frenzy of asset-allocation has already started. With a single interest rate, corporate bonds will begin to outweigh government issues, equity markets will take on new importance, and cross-border competition will drive M&A. Peter Lee reports.

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. "What I and others had thought was an ambitious view of European prospects - and some farther away from Europe saw as unjustifiable optimism - seriously underestimated the pace of change and the opportunities here," says Sir David Walker, executive chairman of Morgan Stanley in Europe.

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