The dastardly Mr Deedes
HSBC’s recent AGM was its usual lively affair, with disgruntled investors venting their grievances at the scandal-ridden bank’s board. All apart from one po-faced stakeholder who remarked pompously: ‘A lot of these people simply like the sound of their own voice. Personally I think you’re doing a great job.’ What was HSBC’s bijou chief executive, and Herr Flick look-a-like, Stuart Gulliver’s reaction to this servile interjection? ‘Lavish applause,’ says my source.
Re HSBC, the temperature inside Westminster’s drab Queen Elizabeth II conference centre where the AGM took place was practically freezing. A cunning ploy to discourage cantankerous old boobies from gracing the event in future?
Former Goldman Sachs deputy dawg, Gary Cohn, now director of President Trump’s National Economic Council, is cited as replacement for matronly Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen. Cohn, 56, is a big beast intellectually and physically – he’s 6ft 3in and 16 stone – but his interpersonal skills may require polish. According to Greg Smith’s entertaining memoir Why I Left Goldman Sachs, Cohn’s attempt at small talk with staff was to ‘hike up one leg, plant his foot on the person’s desk, his thigh close to the employee’s face, and ask how the markets were doing’.
The Milken Institute Global Conference, hosted by former junk bond king Michael Milken, 70, looks a worthy rival to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon and Google chairman Eric Schmidt are all on the speaking roster this week. No British business bigwigs are there, as it’s all the way over in Beverly Hills. That hasn’t deterred business-loving Prince Andrew from schlepping over to promote his Pitch@Palace charity.
Soho House founder Nick Jones’s new £200m members club The Ned, situated across from the Bank of England in the old Midland headquarters, marks his first foray into the City. Perhaps Jones’s newsreader wife Kirsty Young, who hails from East Kilbride, should have advised him of the term’s much more derogatory meaning north of the Border – where Non Educated Delinquents are louts and petty criminals. None of those in the City of London, of course!