It was not the news of the blind panic sweeping through the City of London that worried him, being subjective his own fate was even worse, he was out of a job. Down and out in fekking Dublin, he thought paraphrasing George Orwell’s words. In just a few days things had accelerated at a frightening speed. Perhaps he should have become a teacher as his dad had once tried to convince him: ‘you’ll never be rich, but you’ll never be out of a job.’ But that was not for Clancy; he was ambitious and wasn’t going to hang around waiting for Enniscorthy to change.
There had been nothing but bad news. But Clancy was an optimist and after the initial shock he had started to pick to up the pieces consoling himself with the vague idea he would in some way weather the storm out. Then just as his mood began to improve, his peace of mind was shattered; a call from a former colleague informed him of the rumour going around that the bastards would be asking traders to pay back their bonuses. There was no fekking way he was going to do that — he couldn’t. He’d spent a good part of what he had been paid pissing it up in nightclubs from Reykjavik to Marbella.
The bank’s brokerage firm had made too many bad bets and there had been barely enough left to pay the salaries due. The roof had fallen in; the Irish Netherlands had cut them loose, and so quickly Clancy still hadn’t quite realized what had happened.
After a call from his friend Dermot O’Toole he perked up. Almost miraculously a buyer for the house had been found — provided Clancy was prepared to accept an offer. O’Toole, just as desperate, would accept a much lower commission if a deal could be struck. Clancy, given his state of mind, was desperate. He jumped at the offer.
Normally a house sale took weeks to go through, but the buyer, a writer he had vaguely heard of, had ready cash. It was no less than divine intervention. O’Toole had little difficulty in convincing him to accept the offer. The alternative was the bailiffs seizing the property to pay for the Porsche and all the other debts Clancy had piled up.
After a weekend during which the combined European governments promised an eye-watering sum of taxpayers’ money to save the banks, the deal between Clancy and O’Connelly was brokered. Two weeks later contracts were exchanged and Clancy’s bank account credited with the cash netted from the sale. After solicitor’s fees and his outstanding debts settled Clancy distributed what was left to several different bank accounts, selecting those he judged, from his relatively short professional experience, to be solid.
Liam was now without a home or a job. At the wheel of his Porsche, momentarily saved, he waved goodbye to Dublin and motored south to his parents in Enniscorthy where his father ran a farm supplies business a couple of miles outside of town. There, not too convincingly, he tried to explain to his sceptical parents things were looking up. He would cross the water. London he told them would be filled with opportunities for an enterprising young businessman — he omitted adding when things got back to normal.
Once the initial euphoria of having the profit from the sale of his house more or less safely deposited in the bank, Liam wondered whether he had acted too quickly or not, though given the catastrophic situation he had to admit there was no other alternative but to accept the best of a bad deal. He was now better off by almost a million euros, which after all was said and done was not bad for a young lad from Enniscorthy.
After a few days of cruising the town in his Porsche and explaining to the local lads the ins and outs of the financial crisis — and of course his role — he realized the was no returning to small town life. It was time to think about reinvesting his capital, a difficult task given the unstable condition of the economy in the first phase of a what looked like a deep and possibly prolonged recession.
For the young ex-trader the task was more complicated than it could have appeared to an outsider. In reality he knew little of banking and investment. His job at the Irish Netherlands Bank brokerage firm was little more than a computer game. He could recite from memory all the listed firms of not only the small Dublin stock exchange, but also its parent the Deutsche Bourse, and even the Footsie 100. In addition he could manipulate an impressive range of computer trading tools; unfortunately now of little use, in view of the number of similarly qualified people looking for jobs in London, New York and no doubt just about every other financial centre in the world.
Job vacancies had slumped by over forty per cent in the Square Mile and its Canary Wharf extension, on top of that the average salary was down and bonus prospects nil. And that was just the beginning Liam thought as he mulled over what seemed like an endless flow of catastrophic news.
Lying in his room after an evening at the pub on Slaney Street, still feeling a little euphoric after the beer he had downed and the boost he got from the admiring attention of the local girls, he started to ponder his next move. A visit to Enniscorthy fresh from the fray was one thing, but if he were to hang around it would surely tarnish his image as a young up and coming financier.
He felt little consolation that others were in the same boat, like the head of a now defunct Icelandic bank Liam had traded with. The ex-banker had the misfortune to have bought a home in west London for over ten million pounds, financed by his own bank just months before it collapsed; he also was out of a job and was being pursued for unethical use of bank funds.
Analysing the situation he came to the blurry conclusion the laws of gravity had once again been demonstrated. The market’s vertical rise had met with an equal and opposite force — or something like that; Liam had not been good at physics — and had collapsed. The same thing had happened to the property market, oil, commodities and the dream of a brave new world according to Tony Blair and George Bush.
Having hit the floor things were bound to pick up again, once the shakeout was over, as they always had. Liam figured he couldn’t do much about the price of oil or commodities, buying shares was dicey he had learned, but what had saved him; the house of course!
He decided, however, that Ireland was not the best place to invest in. He had also learnt it was difficult to be a prophet in his own country, to the people of Enniscorthy he was still Liam Clancy, Jim Clancy’s son, who had only just escaped the fiasco in Dublin.
That morning he had watched a report on CNN concerning Marbella where the situation was even worse than Ireland, a property development firm was offering two homes for the price of one; a buyer of one of their villas would get a studio thrown in for free. Times had changed, only the previous summer he had rented a hugely expensive villa with his friends at the same Guadalmina Golf and Country Club Park he had visited with Tom Barton.
The lesson he had learnt over the past month was sellers did not call the shots in a bear market. If he played his cards right perhaps he could pick up a good deal. The next morning he called Ryan Air and booked a flight for Marbella the following Saturday morning.