Capital

on Roger’s desk were three computer screens, one of them tracking departmental activity in real time, another being Roger’s own PC, given over to email and IM and video- conferencing and his diary, another tracking trades in the foreign exchange department over the year. According to that they were showing a profit of about £75,000,000 on a turnover of £625,000,000 so far, which, although he said it himself, wasn’t bad. Simple justice, looking at those numbers, would surely see him awarded a bonus of £1,000,000. But it had been a strange year in the markets ever since the collapse of Northern Rock a few months before. Basically, the Rock had destroyed itself with its own business model. Their credit had dried up, the Bank of England had been asleep, and the punters had panicked. Since then, credit had been more expensive, and people were twitchy. That was OK as far as Roger was concerned, because in the foreign exchange business, twitchy meant volatile, and volatile meant profitable. The FX world had seen a number of fairly self-evident one-way bets against high-interest currencies, the Argentinian peso for instance; some rival firms’ FX departments had, he knew, made out like bandits. This was where the lack of transparency became a problem. The Politburo might be benchmarking him against some impossible standard of profitability based on some whizz-kid idiot, some boy racer who had pulled off a few crazy unhedged bets. There were certain numbers which couldn’t be beaten without taking what the bank told him to think of as unacceptable risks. The way it worked, however, was that the risks tended to seem less unacceptable when they were making you spectacular amounts of money.
    The other potential problem was that the bank might claim to be making less money overall this year, so that bonuses in general would be down on expectations – and indeed there were rumours that Pinker Lloyd was sitting on some big losses in its mortgage loan department. There had also been a well- publicised disappointment over their Swiss subsidiary, which had been outcompeted in a takeover fight and seen its stock price drop 30 per cent as a result. The Politburo might claim that ‘times are hard’ and ‘the pain must be shared equally’ and ‘we’re all giving a little blood this time’ and (with a wink) ‘next year in Jerusalem’. What a gigantic pain in the arse that would be.
    Roger moved around in his swivel chair so that he was looking out the window towards Canary Wharf. The rain had cleared and the early-setting December sun was making the towers, normally so solid-looking and unethereal, seem momentarily aflame with clean gold light. It was half past three and he would be at work for another four hours minimum; these were the months during which he would both leave the house before the sun had risen and get home long after it had set. That was something Roger had long since stopped noticing or thinking about. In his experience, people who complained about City hours were either about to quit, or about to be sacked. He swivelled back the other way. He preferred to face inwards, towards ‘the pit’ as everyone called it, in honour of the trading floors where people yelled and fought and waved papers – though the foreign exchange trading department couldn’t be less like that, as forty people sat at screens, murmuring into headsets or at each other but in general hardly looking up from the flow of data. His office had glass walls, but there were blinds which could be lowered when he wanted privacy, and he had a new toy too, a machine generating white noise, which could be turned on to prevent conversation being overheard outside the room. All department heads had one. It was genuinely cool. Most of the time, though, he liked having the door of his office open so he could feel the activity in the room outside. Roger knew from experience that being cut off from your department was a risk, and that the more you knew about what was going on among your underlings the less chance you had of unpleasant surprises.
    He knew this partly because of the way he had got his job. He had been deputy in the very same department when the bank suddenly brought in random drugs tests. Four of his colleagues were tested and all four failed, which was no surprise to Roger, since the tests were on a Monday and he knew perfectly well that all the younger traders spent the whole weekend completely off their faces. (Two of them had