Dress code

Just been to see my tailor.

There seems to be a perception among people I meet at Sunday lunches around Sussex that the City is full of immaculately-suited gentlemen with bowler hats and furled umbrellas straight out of Mary Poppins. True, the denizens of the Square Mile are still a great deal more smartly dressed than most of the population, but that’s hardly saying much. Insurance brokers, fund managers, market makers, a lot of them don’t bother to do more than pull a couple of high-ticket suits off an Armani rack and treat them with the same level of care they’d show a football sock.

My tailor hasn’t entirely understood the deterioration in standards either. Though his custom must be much reduced, his conversation suggests he still thinks I am typical of my breed in my sartorial concern. ‘About time you had a new suit or two,’ he said this afternoon. ‘Got to keep you looking smart for your clients.’

I haven’t the heart to tell him the wealthiest people on the planet go to work in jeans and t-shirts. The only clients who still care how I dress are those whose fortunes are in rapid decline. Hardly worth trying to impress them.

Offshore Banking

I've been ruminating on the suggestion by Professor Alan Blinder (poor fellow: A. Blinder - no wonder he never got the top job at the Federal Reserve) that millions of high-skilled US and UK jobs might be effectively outsourced to cheaper staff in India and China. He has focused on accountants, computer programmers and lawyers, but why not bankers too?

Certainly our Back Office could all be sent to Bangalore, as could most of the Middle Office. Those various consultants that have been inflicted on us over the last few years always long to consolidate the equity and fund research teams that are currently scattered across the world. Why not replace them altogether with a cadre of Chinese brains accessible via broadband?

But then we come to the core of the business. Could my job be done by a bright young Indian graduate based out of Mumbai? On the face of it, that seems a ridiculous proposition. This is a trust business, we all cry. Clients demand long term relationships with their private bankers. They want to be able to drop in at any moment and chat about their portfolio over a superior glass of claret. Doesn't that protect us, at least, from the Blinder effect?

I wonder. Quite a few of my clients now communicate with me almost exclusively by email and telephone. That's how they like it. I may go and visit them once a year to reinforce the relationship, but that could just as well be done as part of a grand annual tour by that young Mumbai fellow. Not great for his carbon footprint, but probably much cheaper than keeping me on.

I'm not too worried about my own job. This isn't the fastest-evolving sector of the banking industry, and I only need a few more years. But it might be another reason to discourage my son from following in his papa's venerable footsteps.

I'd be curious to hear views from bankers of all stripes. Are any of you concerned about your long-term prospects?

Did I mention I’m seeing a psychotherapist? She asked me yesterday to rank the ten most important things in my life, and when I’d finished with children, freshly mown lawns, Bordeaux and so on, she said, ‘What about money?’
It hadn’t occurred to me to mention money. ‘Obviously that’s top of the list,’ I laughed.
She didn’t laugh. ‘That’s so sad,’ she said, meaning it.
She’s Jewish and lives in Hampstead and thinks I have an unhealthy relationship with money.
I’m starting to wonder.

What extraordinary things we have learnt about Lord Browne today. But is it true he doesn't drive? How refreshing to hear that of an oil CEO.

To be honest, I'm rather saddened by the whole miserable business. It seems such a stupid coda to a great career. In ten years, will we remember anything else about him?

Pity the giants. Their weak spots are such easy targets.

The List

Ah... the Rich List. Every year, I experience the same curious sensation when the Sunday Times puts this out. That inner glow that comes from knowing a large part of the country is thinking - for a few hours at least - about the stuff of my daily grind. This year I have the added joy of seeing not one but two of my clients join the list for the first time. Actually, the estimates of their wealth are way off the mark, but that doesn't really matter. Both have called me today, astonishingly to thank me - as if I had anything to do with either their personal wealth creation or the compilation of the list. Of course they're not really thanking me. They're celebrating, and they want me to celebrate with them. The "thank you" is only to excuse the disturbance of my Sunday. Really, I should have called them first to offer my congratulations and so head off all the younger, hungrier private bankers who'll be placing calls to their offices tomorrow morning. The energy just isn't in me these days.

The Sunday Times's wealth estimations are compelling, I'll admit, but ultimately rather useless. Two different measures would be much more informative:

First is the amount of investable wealth, the only figure that my sort ever cares about. It's all very well that the Swire family's stake in the eponymous Group is worth one and a half billion, but it's not as if they're free to do much with it. If Sir Adrian were to grace me with his business, I could certainly suggest a few ways of raising spending money against his paper, but I doubt very much I could invoice him annually for 1% of £1.5bn.

The other measure I'd be curious to see is the effective wealth of these individuals. The Queen may only be worth £320m, but she enjoys a lifestyle (tupperware cereal containers aside) commensurate with a fortune ten times that sum. The ST figure is really rather meaningless in her case. Similarly, a number of the relatively impecunious celebrities at the bottom of the list probably attract freebie vacations, jewellery, cars and travel to match the spending power of the much richer but duller men of finance, property and (I love this one) baking. In the final analysis, isn't one's effective wealth the only measure that really matters in this life? I dare say Keira Knightley, on her paltry £14 million, is having a pretty good time of it.

The latest revelation from the consumer organization Which?: "Free banking is a myth".

Good Lord, these people are geniuses.

Unwired

There seems to be an unreasonable degree of nervousness setting in amongst my younger colleagues, now that the Barclays-ABN merger is official. They all fear the move will send a tsunami of consolidation through the industry, leading to mass-redundancy and the end of our glorious summer of bonuses and expense accounts.

I have a different kind of worry. I was walking along Cornhill this afternoon when I felt an unusual prickling sensation in my scalp. I know I will only confirm my standing as a technological ignoramus if I try to connect this with today's launch of the City-wide Wi-Fi network, but intuitively I know this to be the cause. Has anyone seriously studied the health implications of bombarding us all with yet more radio waves (or whatever the hell they are)?

What I don't understand is why they had to do this here. Can there be a square mile anywhere else in the country with as many broadband connections as the City of London? Why not start in a place with no existing broadband - somewhere French perhaps. Who on earth do they think needs the extra connectivity around here? Are there City workers who take their laptops into McDonalds and run analyses of public companies with a Big Mac in one hand? These are not film students with nowhere else to keep warm, or a desperate yearning for the company of Starbucks staff to save them from lonely oblivion. If they honestly can't do without email in the taxi home, their Blackberrys will function all the way to Notting Hill - unlike The Cloud's offering. Skype, you say? Don't make me laugh. Have you ever met a banker who worried about the cost of his calls? No one's going to lug their laptop over to the Royal Exchange just to save their bank a few quid when phoning home.

I wish The Cloud every success, speaking as a kind-hearted capitalist, but I don't expect they'll find their silver lining in the City.

Boy Wonder

Now I know I'm in trouble. Thank you, "lucy", for the news that the FT piece has been picked up by The Week. A number of clients who would never dream of buying the FT, including Mrs X of Cornwall, are devoted readers of The Week.

I look forward to Cornish storms hitting a small corner of the City sometime tomorrow.

My son, by the way, has spent the day training for next year's London marathon. Is there a lower age limit? If so, he is several years short of it (although I don't think he has been made aware of this yet by his mother, to whom I always delegate such high-risk news-bearing). Nonetheless, he thinks he is in with a chance of winning. He had me time him over a distance of two hundred metres in a nearby lane, then extrapolated - using unfaultable mathematics - to a time of just under two hours for the whole course.

I shall be the proudest father in Christendom.

"Come back AC"

When I was fourteen, I did something rather foolish at school. In these Cameron salad days, that admission sounds alarmingly trendy, but in fact my transgression was rather more serious than an indulgence in soft drugs, and I very much hoped it would remain undetected. Therefore it was not a pleasant feeling when my housemaster, in an announcement after lunch, used a formulation of words which – though innocent to the rest of the boys – made it clear that he was on to me.

A similar effect was achieved by the front page of the FT last week. The innocent formulation that caught my eye was this: “The tale of poisoned goldfish”. Anyone who has read my first post will understand why my stomach turned in on itself in a manner I haven’t experienced for a number of decades.

The revelation that this blog has caught the eye of Jonathan Guthrie, columnist for the Financial Times, coming as it did somewhere between Sussex and a London rail terminus (I find myself suddenly coy on the more specific details), brought with it a number of emotions. Aside from the initial nausea, the predominating reaction was one of wonder that I could have laboured so many years in the City without once doing anything to merit the several column inches devoted to this frankly trivial diary. Admittedly, private bankers aren't supposed to attract attention, but all the same it feels like a terrible indictment of my lacklustre career.

Of course, I'm grateful to Mr Guthrie for his kind review of my ramblings. It is without doubt the first time in my life I have been accorded the accolade, "a rare flash of talent". Mind you, I have a suspicion Mr Guthrie was merely hoping to soften the blow of his next, more accurate appraisal: "burnt-out". Ouch. Still, I can't fault the judgement of a man who uses splendid words like "helot" (which sent me scrambling for my dictionary).

I'm glad to say I can set the good Guthrie's concerns to rest: I haven't been fired. Admittedly, the likelihood of that fate is somewhat greater now. Indeed I've spent the last few days keeping a very low profile and praying that LL in particular should not have his attention drawn to the FT piece. But a week has passed, and I think I've got away with it. LL isn't terribly bright as it happens, so he might not actually recognize the published description of our shared contretemps. Have I been "toying with career suicide"? Perhaps, but interestingly my fear has always been that this might be read by clients, not colleagues. No doubt that says something about my naivety, but at least it shows I've been well trained in the private banking code of client confidentiality. As the internet address was not published, I'm counting on the general laziness of my colleagues to prevent them seeking out this blog.

No, I haven't been fired. In fact, the reason for my silence has been rather more serious. I have been ill. Not physically, but to my shame I have recently gone through what could best be described as a minor breakdown. It hasn't been obvious, I hope, to my colleagues and clients, but since this blog is all about honesty I may as well come clean on this matter too. I like to think I'm fairly robust, and that when push came to shove I wouldn't be too traumatised if someone took away my iPod or likened me to Mr Bean. But around the end of February, something just stopped functioning in my brain. It had a lot to do with the sense of futility I experienced at the beginning of the year, and I don't want to dwell on the gloomy details, but suffice to say March was not a good month for me (or my poor, long-suffering family). At the time I suspected that this bloggish introspection might have contributed to my malaise, and so it seemed wise to stop it for a while. However I've since taken a very pleasant and relaxing holiday, and am feeling much more positive about this banking life. So what if it is futile? The money's good, and excellent restaurants are always close at hand. Besides, nothing could better stroke a burnt-out banker’s ego than a direct appeal for more from the pages of the FT. Jonathan, how could my vanity resist your flattery?

Tears everywhere

It's been an unhappy day in my family.

I got home to find my elder daughter in tears because Britney Spears had shaved her head. She's threatening to do the same "in solidarity".

My son had managed to burn his little sister with candle wax, making both of them cry.

My wife was in a fury because she'd taken the children into London for a half-term Natural History museum outing, and she wasn't aware that the congestion charge now applied to K&C. Believing entry without prior payment meant an automatic fine of hundreds of pounds, she took it out on the children when she discovered her mistake. Then she decided - now she was "in the zone" - to make the most of it and visit me at work.

This is generally a bad idea anyway, but today it was hopeless. Most considerately, she turned up at lunchtime, not realising that 12-2 is often my peak slot. Never more than today, when I had three investment banker clients all wanting to talk tactics against the event that Peter Hain's insane suggestion (city firms should give away two thirds of their bonus pots to charity) ever becomes more than wishful thinking. I don't think this is likely, but there's not much any of us can do if Labour go down that route. "Emigrate" will be my professional recommendation.

Anyway, these three bankers all wanted to see me in their lunch break, meaning mine disappeared into back-to-back meetings, complicated by the fact that we couldn't let any of them spot each other near my office. By chance, all three work for the same firm - we really can't let them know they also share a private banker.

When my wife finally got the message that I wasn't able to see her for an hour and a half, she shouted at the children again and raced back home. (She doesn't normally raise her voice - the CC fine spectre had a powerful effect on her) My attempts to soothe matters this evening were not successful. I explained that the congestion charge can be paid after the event, even did it for her, but this had the opposite result to the one I expected. Instead of saying, "oh that's all right then," she too started crying, and yelled at me, "so I shouted at the children for NO REASON!".

I suppose it's all my fault somehow or other. I'm taking refuge in my study until her sleeping pill kicks in.

Postscript: Is it true that Citi Private Banking is piling back into Japan? Brave souls after last time...

Swift Leaks

It's rare for a private banker to feel like the world revolves around him. We do too much scurrying after clients to suffer that illusion. But just occasionally a warm sensation comes over one as it becomes clear that it is the client who has done the scurrying. This being a very straightforward money-measured business, the richer the client the warmer the sensation.

An American client, JL, came to see me this morning. He is, let's say, a captain of industry on the East Coast, an exceedingly dignified and busy man. He keeps about thirty million dollars with us - perhaps a tenth of his total liquid wealth. I've never really established his reasons, but thirty million is a nice lump to have. My occasional suggestions that he might like to place more with us have always been met with silence. Money comes in and goes out, but the balance remains the same.

When I asked what brought him to England, he looked at me rather peculiarly and said, 'You'. Obviously. 'You've come all this way to discuss your portfolio?' But he was agitated and not in the mood to answer questions. 'This Swift thing,' he said. 'It's a disgrace.' 'Indeed, it is,' I said. 'You Europeans need more spine,' he said. 'We sure do,' I agreed. 'You should stand up to us,' he continued. 'We really should,' I nodded vigorously.

'This Swift thing', in case you're not aware, is the latest attack on privacy justified by the War on Terror. SWIFT is the Belgian financial messaging company across whose wires a large proportion of European transactions are conducted. They have an inordinate amount of information on European money flows, and they've recently been shown to be slavishly supplying the whole lot to the CIA. Pressures have been brought to bear by Washington, but still it's inexcusable and deeply worrying for several of my clients.

Not that I'd expected it to be a problem for JL.

'I have a problem,' he said. 'Oh?' I said. 'Some of my transfers,' he said. 'I would hate for them to be seen by my government.' 'Oh,' I said.

I've always hated this bit, although there's also an undeniable morbid fascination to a client's sudden confession. Everyone, even the most unlikely people, seem to have skeletons.

'Look, it's much better not to tell me if the money's coming from some unconventional source.' We have these neat little words that make 'illegal' sound so much more palatable. They trip off the tongue so easily after a few years in this job.

'The source is fine,' he said, 'It's where it's going.' 'Oh,' I said. 'Senators,' he said. 'Oh dear,' I said. 'Right,' he said.

So that's his little secret. The reason we enjoy his business. A neat little offshore operation to [excised in a moment of paranoia brought on by the FT]. Well, there are various solutions, most of which involve getting his funds even further offshore - to a handy Pacific Island perhaps. The challenge now is to convince him we can still handle it. We're actually very good at establishing concealed trusts in far-off hot places, so I'm hopeful we'll keep the business. There's not a lot I can do about his transactions to date though. Fingers crossed the US Treasury and the CIA have more important things to look for.

Colourful Clients

A clash in the meeting rooms this morning.

LL, who’s a shit, had a client from the music business in, and he was under the impression that he’d booked the best room. It has a couple of old masters and some very fine walnut furniture, which younger clients are surprisingly taken by. Actually, I’d booked the room (though LL still disputes this) for a meeting with one of my clients, also in the music business.

Huge mess when LL walks in with his client, dressed tastefully in chocolate gabardine and a hundredweight of silver and gold, only to encounter my client, dressed just as tastefully in all-white nylon and a cream baseball cap.

Gabardine and Nylon do not see eye to eye, according to the tabloids. There were some indigestible words exchanged, a well-practised warm-up, and both gentlemen seemed to be enjoying the confrontation, until it dawned on them that this was no club or recording studio but a rather conservative financial institution, the likes of which they would never publicly admit to frequenting. For such clients we have underground parking and a secluded lift, so that no one need know the shameful fact that they are careful with their money. I gather certain brothels have the same arrangements.

Unfortunately for Gabardine and Nylon, they had inadvertently caught each other in flagrante. My client's full portfolio was spread out on the table, and until the interruption he’d been making not a bad fist of understanding the little graphs and pie charts we like to knock up. Nice chap, Nylon, although he turned livid when he realized there was a witness to his financial prudence, especially one who, in his words, had ---ed his momma with a spanner on the piano (this sounded rather more rhythmic and fiery than it’s coming across here).

I tried to point out that both clients were in the same position, and therefore a pact of silence might be invoked, but neither was content with that. LL kept an icy silence as he steered his client out, throwing me a venomous look when neither client was looking.

I’m going to have to give Nylon a fee holiday, I fear.

Why life is more expensive

The ONS has released a personal inflation calculator. I wanted to try it out but got defeated, as usual, by the technology. Couldn't make it work. Oh well. I already know my personal inflation is a bloody site higher than 2.7%. Look at what I have to pay for: school fees, petrol, my wife's salon visits, my own restaurant habit, endless decorating and plumbing work, and gas to heat the worst-insulated house in the country. A rough guess would put my inflation rate somewhere around 15%.

Could this be a useful statistic for the next salary negotiation?

Interest Rate Rise

A VERY wealthy client has just been on the phone to me grumbling about the latest quarter of a percent. He has a mortgage, and he's concerned about the increase in interest payments he will face. I think he expects me to do something about it, although exactly what influence he imagines I have with the Bank of England I'm not clear.

It may seems strange that the rich use mortgages, but really it's just a way for them to get hold of more money to invest - at a cost of only a little over five percent (or rather, as of next month, five and a quarter percent). This particular client has an eighteen million quid mortgage (it is a very large house, on a very large estate). Does that make you feel better about yours? As a result of this rate rise, he'll have to fork out an extra £45,000 a year. The pain! The hardship! Of course, if I told you what his pre-tax investment profits were last year, you wouldn't feel quite so sorry for him.

Luckily he didn't notice the immediate fall in the market when the rate rise was announced at noon, or he might have given me grief about that as well. By the time he called there had already been a full recovery (which of course, I did my best to claim credit for).

Anyway, he wants me to find him a cheaper mortgage. I shall of course go through the motions - send him lots of useless offers from other institutions - until he is either convinced that our in-house product remains the best value... or else he is too dazed by all the papers to bother with it any further. What's £45,000 extra a year, after all?

Confidential or not?

I've been staying away, not writing.

I got nervous, to be honest. Something about that Turin client and his goldfish murders. I have no idea if anyone's actually looked at this blog yet. There's no way to tell how many hits it has had (unfortunate term give the business my Turin client is associated with). But as I've told myself already, there's no way any of my clients is going to find this blog in a million years.

If I’m going to do this, there's no point panicking about clients reading it.

My oldest client, Mrs X, resident in Cornwall, domiciled in the UK, has 14 million quid stashed in Zurich. Undeclared money, in the delicate language of our Swiss cousins. Or rather it was stashed in Zurich, but what with the European Savings Directive, we’ve moved it to Singapore for her to avoid this wretched new withholding tax. It’s making about a million a year in income that Gordon Brown will never get his mitts on.

There. I’ve just committed the gravest sin in the private banking universe. Goldfish indiscretions are nothing to this.

It’s curiously liberating to cross the line.

Le Chiffre

An excursion with my son to the cinema last night. Would you believe, the villain in the new Bond film is a private banker! We're so used to them being oil magnates or silicon chip billionaires - the people on the client side of the private banking desk. I vaguely remember the book from years ago, but only for its torture scene (lovingly recreated in the film, to my son's rapt delight). I had forgotten Le Chiffre was one of us (was he, in the book?) - mostly because I wasn't in this business then.

Further wonders, a key part of the plot was Le Chiffre's attempt to short the stock of an airline company. New Bond, new sophistication. I've tried to explain shorting to any number of Sussex friends over the years and always drawn a blank. But how can you sell shares before you buy them? It doesn't make sense! Now I need only refer them to Casino Royale.

What makes Britain rich?

Did anyone see this on TV last night? I rather hoped it might feature lots of new young millionaires in need of a reputable banker, but in fact it was more of a survey of the economy, with Peter Snow looking astonished that agriculture should now account for a smaller hunk of GDP than "finance" (us). I nearly turned off when they interviewed some moron who had remortgaged his house to soup up his car. Fifty thousand quid he'd spent. On brakes and a sound system. Insane. He made some joke about his daughter forgiving his squandering of her inheritance, although I strongly doubt she has.

Anyway, they got to the HNWIs in the second half of the programme. John Caudwell was shown looking very comfortable in his Jacobean mansion, confessing to having made the whole of Stoke-on-Trent "a little bit wealthier". They were trying to get him to say that his wealth must have come at the expense of someone else, but he quite firmly set them right: "wealth creates wealth". Bravo.

They interviewed only one private banker - some Citi fellow I didn't recognize - who cheerfully informed the public that the rich were getting much richer, and you could sense the mental rubbing of hands together as he said it. More clients, more assets - more fees...

But the prize has to go to Felix Dennis (who is apparently spending £250 million to create a new broadleaf forest of 30,000 acres). When asked what the wealthy have in common, he declared that most rich people are "shits".

Good for you, Felix. If any of my clients caught that, I'd love to have seen their faces.

I had a dream last night that my Turin client read this.

I've been feeling edgy all day. Which is ridiculous. There's no way a multi-millionaire Italian grandfather is going to spend his time surfing English blogs, and anyway the internet's a huge huge place. He wouldn't find it in a million years.

Still, I feel rather foolhardy to be doing this at all.

Email-free Christmas

I'm under something of a black cloud.

Going back to work yesterday, expecting a relatively easy week, I found myself being summoned by the Boss the moment I stepped into the office. It was clear something was wrong, and I had one of those dread headmaster's office moments that one never really leaves behind, made worse by the fact the Boss is younger than me.

It seems a client of mine, a rather successful barrister with a splendid line in consumer product prosecutions, took it into his head over Christmas to buy a house in Dubai. He was out there with family, sunning himself on the beach, when someone suggested acquiring a piece of one of those huge palm islands they're building. Some clever salesman convinced him that if he didn't put the money down there and then, there would never be another house available at such a reasonable price, ever. So this anxious barrister picks up the phone to our office, expecting to find me at my desk on Boxing Day apparently, with an order to liquidate a chunk of his portfolio and speed the winnings to the UAE.

Now feasibly we could have done this for him when the market opened on the 27th. Except that no one who knew anything about his account was in the office until the new year. And what's more, no one could find a home address or phone number for me. As our house is in a valley with absolutely no mobile reception, those diligent worker bees whom my barrister managed to reach on the 26th resorted to email.

This is where the black cloud comes in. No one here, it seems, can credit my protestation that I simply don't check email over the Christmas break. Ever more urgent messages were piling up in my inbox, with me blissfully unaware and attending instead to the fowl drama taking place in the woodburner chimney and the even fouler drama of my children around the Christmas tree. By the 29th, the barrister - who is not a client with whom I can claim to have much rapport - had escalated the matter to a board director who, regrettably, he happens to know. This particular seagull did what all seagulls do from their great height, and unfortunately the Boss caught most of the consequence - at home, on New Year's Eve, just as he was about to go out to some fabulous Notting Hill party.

I spoilt his evening, apparently. Oh yes, and I've lost a client. Luckily he's agreed to remain with the bank, so I'm not in too much trouble, but there's still a certain disbelief all round that I could make it through nine days without email. When I explain to my various colleagues that I don't regard sifting through advertisements for viagra a particularly festive way to spend Christmas, they say things like But what if there's an important message? I would have had a stronger riposte before this debacle.

Anyhow, it will blow over. But I do seem to have cemented the perception in my younger colleagues' minds that I belong to some technological stone age where bankers went about their business in coffee houses and knocked off at a quarter past three. I don't mind being seen as an old-fashioned type - I'm rather proud to be the only banker I know without a Blackberry - but it will become a problem if they start to doubt my competence in assessing, say, hi-tech or media stocks. And I'm going to have to work a bit harder at demonstrating I'm right up to date on the latest funds and instruments (which I fear I'm not, but that's a different matter).

Moral of the story: be prepared to wade through viagra at least every other day.

New Year's Resolution

It's been a grey old Christmas, and the family's going through a swill trough of bad feeling because of some misunderstanding over the placement of the angel on the Christmas tree. Two of the dogs are sick, a favourite plate from my college days has been broken (culprit to remain unnamed), and some poor bird has gone and blocked the woodburner chimney, meaning that we are without that comforting glow in the corner of the kitchen until we can find a sweep willing to interrupt his holidays. Saddam has been killed, so Blair and Bush can tell themselves they've achieved something, while in Romania and Bulgaria officious leaflets are apparently being circulated by the Home Office to spoil the EU accession celebrations with grim warnings about work permits and heavy fines. Actually, my sense of gloom stems mostly from the realization that this will be my nineteenth year as banker to the wealthy. One can't help dying a little inside at that thought.

I don't mean I want to get out. It's a stable job, well paid, and pleasant enough most of the time. And anyway, I'm too old to change career now. But something about my work has been bothering me the last few months and I don't know what it is. I've never really reflected much on the job - just got on with the business of making the wealthy even wealthier. Now I find myself trying to grasp at some ill-defined source of unease. My New Year's resolution is to tackle the question head on, and writing a blog seems as good a way as any of doing that.

So this is just a kind of therapy, really, as I don't suppose anyone will read this. A middle-aged banker doesn't have quite the same draw as a London call girl (although we probably share a number of clients). But then, who knows? Above all, people have always been interested in sex and money, and if forced to choose, they usually plump for the latter.

Private bankers – the kind who deign to serve only the very rich – know a lot of secrets. We look a boring lot, but you can’t deny the insides of our heads are interesting places. Rich people tell things to their bankers that doctors and priests won’t hear. Never having been rich myself, I can only guess why they do it. My theory is this: if you’re rich, the thing you care about most is your money; you have to trust someone with it, so you might as well trust that person with everything else (those embarrassing little secrets). Sometimes there are good reasons to confide in a banker, for example if there’s an illegitimate son to provide for that the wife doesn’t know about. But it’s hard to explain the more bizarre revelations.

A few weeks ago, I was required to travel to a certain small village west of Turin so that an ageing patriarch worth ninety million euros could share with me his guilty secret: for twenty years he has been putting vinegar in his favourite daughter’s fish tank. The fish have been dying prematurely, causing the poor girl continuous grief, and the patriarch has no idea why he keeps doing it. He just felt the need to confess to someone. When I asked if he’d like to consider a restructuring of his portfolio, he smiled faintly and told me I could go. A whole day wasted, with nothing to show for it – it’s not like we can charge for our time in this business.

The trouble is, these days we really are the only confessors around. Hardly anyone bothers with a priest, and the Hippocratic oath is difficult to take seriously after the Green Wing. Only private bankers really look like they will keep a secret. That’s the Swiss marketing machine for you. The odd thing is, it seems to work. Occasionally I try to wheedle client gossip out of my colleagues, but they always turn grave and say things like well of course I can’t go into that, now, can I?

Makes you want to explode sometimes, the confidentiality. Some days I long to get up on my desk and yell the truth about that fat bastard in Italy who’s been emotionally torturing his daughter.

Perhaps that’s the real attraction of writing an anonymous blog.