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Dear Mom, Sitting here in Alastair’s waiting room crammed in with 224 other bankers, all whistling for their money back or preparing to wave it goodbye, I get overwhelmed by this wave of nostalgia or maybe it is nausea, it carries me back to a day when I am fresh out of banking college and have my first posting at head office, licking stamps. I can see the customer comes in to talk to the V/P who looks after his account, they shoot the breeze a while and pour some Bourbon, and then the customer asks the V/P how much he knows about the hog-rearing business, and the V/P says: Not much, so the customer tells him: Well, learn some more, you’re in it on Monday. Later on I find out how this feels, I get into all sorts of businesses with the Last National’s money, real estate, naturally, but also all those Boeings in the Arizona desert, and a tanker fleet until we think to pull the plugs out and bill Lloyd’s of London, and the Casas de los Gatos motel chain in Bulimia we trade our sovereign debt for, but never until now do I figure to find myself part owner of the longest and deepest hole ever to have $9 billion poured down it. It seems a bad idea at the time, which is how I first recall it, a bunch of stuffed shirts gets awarded this unrepeatable concession to dig their way from England to France at their own expense, and also from France to England, apparently they hope to start from both ends and get two tunnels, they send Morgan Grenfell round to rattle the can for this project, with no takers, which is where Alastair comes in. He tells me at the time how this happens, he is sitting in his bank giving everybody hell, which is his style, when the Governor of the Bank of England calls him in and taps him, and tells him how the honour of London as a financial centre is at stake, so he must reach for his bucket and spade and get digging, and dig for money for a start. This is like taking candy from a baby, so Alastair says, just pull a face at the baby and it is too frightened to resist, so he pulls faces at the railroads and the contractors and of course the banks, and the ferry operators for good measure, and in no time he has a base of equity and a tower of debt finance built up on it, our market figures this for a great opportunity, nobody tries to borrow so much money since Bulimia goes pear-shaped, and I make sure to sign the Last National up. So off he goes, boring on the grand scale and pulling more faces all the time, and topping up with money, never mind what it says in the prospectus, this project is not exempted from the Law of Estimates, which defines a contractor’s estimate as a sum of money half as great as the project it refers to finally turns out to cost. Still at least the guys are digging in the right directions, the two ends meet in the middle and Alastair has the tunnel fitted out, and railroad tracks laid down it, and by and by the Queen of England motors thru it in her period Rolls-Royce, which he loads on a flat bed truck, and this is his big moment and for us it is the moment when the trouble starts. We can see all this time his debt is piling up, he borrows money to pay interest on the interest on his interest, which is OK as far as it goes, but naturally we figure once he gets the tunnel open he has trains rushing thru it, and guys on the trains paying fares, and the fares come to us, and one distant day there may be enough left over to pay dividends, I wish. This is not what happens, the trains are no shows, some are just late and some do not work and some are held up by desk jockeys in Brussels who rewrite the specifications half way thru, by now Alastair is making faces at everyone, he tells his stockholders he relies on his lawsuits to boost his revenues, they sure need all the boost they can get and then some, even if he fits them with retro rockets I still cannot figure how they can accelerate faster than compound interest. I smell trouble when old Custer Klesch calls up and bids us for our loan to Eurotunnel at a discount, this is his big business these days, or so he keeps telling the blatts, I mention it to Holey Buckett and he figures if the loan is not worth par the equity must have a minus sign in front of it, he wants Intergalactic to build up a massive short position but I tell him not to mess on our own doorstep. This turns out to be prudent, on account Alastair suddenly switches the governing law, I am here to stand up for the stockholders, he says, this is an Anglo-French project, and under the French rules the banks come last, so these rules are what we play by, and to show I mean it, we shall now stop paying interest, or stop adding interest back to the principal. John Melbourn at NatWest is tearing his hair out, he is by way of being the lead banker on this, the only questions now (he says) are how big a hit we take, and how much stock we end up with, and whether we can do anything else with this hole once we own it, such as marketing it as an exceptionally long thin dolphinarium. So here all we bankers are, waiting on Alastair, who gives us his post-dated resignation but says he stays until we see it his way, me, I think of the V/P who finds himself in the hog-rearing business, just look at the hole we are in, it is like I tell John, we know the light at the end of the tunnel is an approaching shuttle train, but what we do not know is whether it is one of ours. This is not the way I tell it to head office, I say this tunnel is a great concession which sure as eggs makes a fortune for someone, some day, and how lucky our bank is to get in below the sea floor, but my plan is to take Alastair aside and settle for a free pass to Paris for life, much love from
Your submerged son When he gets to Paris, Herbie lunches at the Brasserie du Nord with Christopher Fildes |
