Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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For tax reasons, US banks initially flocked to set up operations in Paris. Morgan Guaranty and Morgan Stanley together had set up Morgan et Cie there to underwrite new issues. Merrill Lynch based their first European headquarters in the French capital, as did Dillon Read. However, a number of European countries grew concerned at the rapidly expanding pool of stateless Eurodollars and took steps to limit its growth. In the early 1960s, France, along with Switzerland, Germany and Italy, prohibited interest payments on foreign deposits.

London had been a far-from-obvious candidate for becoming host to this foreign securities market. An executive with SG Warburg at the time recalled that ‘London was a pretty miserable place to be, beset with post-war gloom, exchange controls and the narrow parochial attitude of the City’.ssss1 However, because of the concentration of banks in London holding Eurodollar deposits, the British authorities began to see an opportunity for the City to ‘fill a vacant role in Europe in mobilising foreign capital for world economic development’.ssss1 That Britain still operated exchange controls that had created a highly regulated onshore domestic economy may in fact have helped create common ground between City firms and the British regulators in pursuing business in this offshore currency market. Stanislas Yassukovitch, then an executive at White Weld and who would go on to be appointed CEO of the European Banking Company and Deputy Chairman of the London Stock Exchange, among other prominent positions, pointed out: