The Pru had to wait agonisingly for him to be released by the Bank
Posted in General on 25. Sep, 2010
The Pru had to wait, agonisingly, for him to be released by the Bank. There was a strange interregnum, as Sir David’s predecessor, Sir Roger Hurn, had the cloud of his involvement in Marconi over him. Marconi had its own problems communicating with shareholders, of course.Sir David was strangely quiet in the autumn, when the row over the Pru’s £1bn rights issue threatened to cost the head of its chief executive, Jonathan Bloomer. Was the letter lost in the Pru’s internal post?The Pru also has a chairman who should know more about the City then anyone.
Yet it cut its dividend a few months after the head of its investment arm, M&G, wrote to UK companies warning them not to cut their dividends. These advisers are paid for by the shareholders, but serve the directors.The Pru is the largest investor in the UK stock market – so it should know what investors need to know. This would be hard to forgive in a normal FTSE 100 company, as they all hire expensive armies of advisers to make sure their lines of communication are clear. Something must happen, but no one is sure quite what.The past couple of years have been ones of terrible miscommunication with the insurer’s shareholders. (He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details.
The mood at Prudential’s headquarters, a hot cake’s throw from where the Great Fire of London started, is a bit like Waiting for Godot. VLADIMIR: Suppose we repented.ESTRAGON: Repented what?VLADIMIR: Oh … The mood at Prudential’s headquarters, a hot cake’s throw from where the Great Fire of London started, is a bit like Waiting for Godot Something must happen, but no one is sure quite what.
As one official, asked about the mounting costs of the war in Iraq, put it: they pale “compared with the costs that the terrorists would like to inflict on us”.Mark Cliffe is chief economist at ING Financial Markets.. The damage this would cause to global confidence, among businesses and consumers, would trigger a severe economic slowdown.Such thoughts might be seen as a serious deterrent to any US plans to launch an attack on Iran in the first place. But it must be remembered that the Bush administration is not viewing its agenda through an economic prism. The terrorist insurgency could be on an even larger scale than in Iraq, and the damage to international relations might prompt a protracted loss of confidence in the financial markets.Thus the victory rally, the upward leg of the V-shaped pattern the markets traced out for the Iraq war, might be rather more tentative in the case of Iran. This would compound the downward pressure on the dollar, while offsetting the “safe haven” buying of US Treasury bonds.