End of recession for companies, Depression for the people?

It struck me once again as I was in Canary Wharf for a meeting, just how different the City of London is from anywhere else I’ve been in the UK.

Canary Wharf Tube Station in London's nouveau-riche financial district

Where the rest of the UK is mired in recession and the jobs outlook is going from dire to desperate, the animal spirits in the financial district seem to be even more on the up than they were last time. Which is pretty remarkable given the near death experience of last week on the stock markets. I even got out at London Bridge and walked through the original City of London where the old money lives just to make use that this wasn’t a Docklands thing.

Tower Bridge. A gratuitous quick blast of the tourist thang, just for the heck of it

Well, I couldn’t resist the tourist shot, though I should know better as an ex-Londoner. However, looking back south from London Bridge I spotted The Shard

The Shard going up south of the river

and as I entered Bank and St Mary’s Axe, home of the Gherkin’s monument to the essential masculinity of finance I get to see a shedload more cranes.

How you get to clean the windows of the Gherkin - looks like it's the hard way

It isn’t quite like watching the skyline of Berlin from the Intercontinental Hotel looking over what used to be East Berlin in the early to mid 1990s, but construction is doing very well in London, and that’s not counting the Olympics work.

Construction galore in front of the Nat West tower

and of course the serious looking guys on their mobiles

guys on mobiles - 1

guys on mobiles - 2

and a quick proprietorial hello to one of my new purchases, with that wonderful juxtaposition of the olde worlde and the new reflected in the glass.

Aviva HQ in the City of London

Ok, so it’s not like I’m Warren Buffett and my vast shareholding in AV. probably bought a stack of pens but there we go

The overall feeling I got in the City of London is that things are going well. This is a small bubble – even on the train as I was leaving it’s easy to see that other parts of London have boarded up shops which can’t all be due to the recent rioting, and as I returned to Ipswich I saw the signs of severe economic distress all around – boarded up shops, abruptly stopped construction works from 2007 and the like.

There’s a split happening, where FTSE 100 companies seem to be doing okay just as the Great British Public is losing their jobs, and being exposed to serious inflation, rising fuel and travel costs to which there seems little end. Hence the title – firms seem to be doing okay despite the consumer heading towards ever-increasing straitened times, I’d go as far as saying running towards Depression times of multi-year decreasing economic experiences.

The contrast between all that construction in the City, the sharp suits and pencil skirts, the purposeful mobile-phone working on the one hand and the slack-jawed chavs hanging around listlessly in the High Street in Ipswich was striking. I don’t normally see the town centre on a workday, and Ipswich isn’t particularly disadvantaged as a town. It doesn’t feel like the prognosis is good for many UK citizens on the economic and the jobs front…