For months, and certainly since Gaza, the mood in the City has been glum. No one was hitting the dancefloor. The music had stopped.
A better tune arrives this week in at least three ways. Mars bought Hotel Chocolat for more than £500 million, which is a lot of Twix.
More encouragingly for London, Young’s thinks Clive Watson’s City Pub Group is worth £162 million, suggesting the future for the capital’s boozers is better than you might have read.
Best of all, Investec, the South African banking giant, had warm words to say about London and its London businesses.
Profits, just in the UK, jumped 41% to £235 million. Which ought to mean that the 1600 staff based on Gresham City opposite the Guildhall can at least count on keeping their jobs for Christmas.
UK chief executive Ruth Leas used the phrase “political stability” more than once in my chat with her today.
“There remains uncertainty,” she said. “But clients in the mid-market space are resilient, there are opportunities here.”
Investec has a dual listing here and in South Africa. Any talk of it scrapping the London bit? Just the opposite. “We moved to London 30 years ago and find it a very attractive place to be. Young people in London are very excited to be here. We are positioning ourselves for the upturn, the politics will settle down.”
The difficult macroeconomic backdrop remains tricky. Markets are volatile and prone to swing wildly if the news is at all worse than expected.
But for the first time in a long-time clients have some sort of visibility on where interest rates and inflation are going (down, we reckon).
It is too early to give David Cameron credit for any of this. But perhaps the feeling that the top three government executives aren’t quite so nuts is going to be very good news for City confidence levels.
Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt might be boring. As far as the Square Mile is concerned, there’s an awful lot to be said for that.
