When one sells the family silver, one does not usually continue to gain value from its use.
So said the Earl of Gowrie in a House of Lords Debate in 1984 soon after Harold Macmillan's famous attack on Mrs Thatcher's privatisation policies.
Now Who Owns Our City, a report by the University of Cambridge & Development Securities shows that more than half of all the buildings in the Square Mile that constitutes the City of London are in foreign hands – up from only 8% in 1980 just after Thatcher came to power.
London attracts more foreign investment than any other city in the world. Germans are the biggest foreign owners in The City proper. And they have not even had to fight a war for it – I think we are meant to be pleased & proud, because unlike migrant workers they don’t have to actually come & live here. Instead all this interest means that City offices (in the real estate sense) show ‘remarkable resilience’ in the face of global meltdown.
And that ‘traditional owners’ – institutions, charities, public sector bodies & livery companies – have been able to swap their equity for cash.
I await with interest (the metaphorical kind) the report which will tell us what that cash has all been spent on – investments which will produce an even better return or the equivalent of new cars & foreign holidays.
Debt problems are much harder to solve without a strong asset base - isn't that what we tell the banks?
