Summary:
The introduction of a more competitive and open free market in the City of London twenty-two years ago has led to a booming and bustling global market free-for-all on the Thames that still does not seem to have reached its peak.

Details or Sample:
The sudden transformation from the old-fashioned “criers market” to a highly deregulated and high-tech trading system on the London Stock Exchange back in 1986 had a dramatic effect that not many could have foreseen. Not only did it lead to huge profits for the financial institutions doing business there, “Big Bang” also ushered in over a twenty year period of phenomenal growth and affluence for both the City of London and greater London, as well. The introduction of a more competitive and open free market has led to a booming and bustling global market free-for-all on the Thames that still does not seem to have reached its peak.

Always having been a city to exert its international influence, Big Bang London has raised its game yet again and become a place of contrasts even more extreme than those it has known the past. A living microcosm of today’s globalized world, where the ever-present black limousines of the super-rich are just as at home as the impoverished Jamaican or African refugee or the grim, knife-wielding youth gangs that battle each other the city’s underworld, London has become the international intersection of the global money world. While rival New York City’s Wall Street has the powerful American market at its base, the City of London has become a more of a magnet for international banking. There are more foreign banks here than anywhere else, with well over 30 percent of all international currency trading taking place here, twice as much as in New York. New stock market quotations are on the march here, as well, with nearly 20 percent of all new initial public offerings taking off in London, as compared to roughly 17% on Wall Street.

Not surprisingly, London attracts more than its fair share of the ultra-rich with their private jets, bodyguard gangs, helicopters and yachts, in no small part due to the freedom and anonymity they can enjoy in a mega-city like this. Whether it is the dubious Russian who made billions in his country’s wild nineties, the Indian industrial tycoon buying his next outrageously expensive mansion in Hyde Park or the Saudi sheikh fleeing the autocratic constraints of his desert home, this is the city where a whole new class of global nouveau extreme-rich has established itself, generally avoiding contact with the traditional London establishment, and usually keeping discreetly hidden from public view.

And yet London is also the “old” London of poverty and social neglect, concrete ghettos, alcohol and drug abuse. It is truly a city of superlatives, its sprawling network of over 25,000 streets attesting to both the many negative and positive aspects such a monstrous place like this can have...

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Written by: clarsonimus
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