They don’t make ’em like David Buik any more. The renowned financial commentator and ex-broker is finally retiring after 59 years and with him disappears another little piece of the old City of London, when real men wore pinstripes and lunched on claret.
When I became a City reporter 11 years ago, that world was already a distant memory. I was a know-nothing newbie tasked with writing features for traders and spread betters, and Mr Buik was a City veteran and commentator at BGC Partners for whom no question was too stupid to answer politely and no reporter too junior to educate patiently. His “Daily Fayre” email was the first finance circular to start dropping into my inbox.
Perhaps he found it possible to take a banking novice like me seriously because he himself had earned his stripes by working and not by passing exams. Mr Buik began his finance career in the 1960s, when it was possible to get a job without so much as an A-level, let alone an economics degree or after a spell in business school.
Banking wasn’t an industry that Oxbridge grads fought to enter; it was the last resort when you had mucked things up too badly to become a lawyer.
His take on the daily flow of corporate news, economic indicators and bond market moves was a world away from the abstract, Americanised jargon that is churned out by bank research departments today. Mr Buik was never going to “reach out” to “demonstrate his core competency” “across different verticals”.
He began his email each day with an extract from a poem – but he was never maudlin or irascible. He celebrated the reign of the slick, identikit BlackRock suits just as much as he adored the fusty regulars straining their braces at Sweetings.
He chronicled boom times and busts – the swallowing up of the British minnow banks by foreign giants, the explosion of the City when Thatcher ended exchange controls, Big Bang, Black Monday, 2008-09, the euro crisis and, most shocking of all, the deaths of 658 BGC colleagues in the Twin Towers attack.
He was the undeterred champion of the Square Mile and all of its people, from the cobblers to the hedgies, an eternal, colourful optimist in a world of cynicism and sterility.
So long, then, Mr Buik – though I don’t really believe you’ll pipe down for long.
Metaverse, almost as bad as reality
Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, has been dragged back from his Silicon Valley jaunt by the realisation that large chunks of the economy are currently being steamrollered by the omicron wave. Perhaps he could have spared himself the trouble and just sent his avatar, like the former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Nick Clegg did this week in a bizarre interview with the Financial Times.
Sir Nick, who is now working as Facebook’s chief lobbyist, decided to make up for being stranded on the west coast of the United States by inviting the FT into the “metaverse”, Facebook’s cartoonish virtual reality world, which appears to consist mainly of empty boardrooms and retro computer game backdrops.
At one point, Sir Nick’s avatar writhed unexpectedly. “I’m drinking my coffee,” he said. “Don’t feel I’m craning my neck weirdly.” Watching it made one feel that the makers of the animated movie Toy Story had really taken a wrong turn.
For its enthusiasts, however, there might be advantages. Mr Sunak could have stayed in Palo Alto and replaced himself with a Botox-faced CGI reciting statistics placidly before a virtual lectern. Would we have noticed?
The only thing that the Rishi 2000 wouldn’t be able to do is launch an opportunistic leadership bid. Invite Conservative Party members to meet you in the “metaverse” and my guess is that most would tell you where to go.
