Liverpool Street Station

Note: I didn;t particularly like my original posting photo taken with mobile phone. I replace it with this one - taken by Orchan.

Liverpool Street Station - the equivalent of New York's Grand Central Station in proximity to wealth - shuffles The City's bankers to and from the suburbs. It is the third busiest in London after Waterloo and Victoria with 123 million visitors each year. I note that movie Mission Impossible takes advantage of this cool moderno setting placing a fabricated CIA "safe house" above the Old Broad Street entrance where Tom Cruise enters the main line concourse to use a payphone situated under the double staircase. Dun dun dun. For most ex-pats, LSS is the gateway to Bishopsgate plaza which, like Midtown Manhattan, provides industrial steel and glass hq's for UBS, Lehman Bros (ker-plunk), Bear Sterns (ker-pow), Merrill Lynch (ker-splat) and other American institutions, whomever may be left. Buy your rent - cheep. On top of the station London's "Square Mile," the wealthiest pinch of land in Europe with the London Stock Exchange, Lloyd's of London (insurance) and the Bank of England herself. starting in the early-90s, many of the global franchises moved to Canary Wharf which offers more real-estate holding many thousands of employees .. it is also a soulless, God-awful area on the Isle of Dogs not far from Greenwich - feel sorry for the poor slobs who work there. The real power shift, in effect, occurred from my arrival in '97 as the money managers chose the West End - Mayfair and St James's own virtually all the hedge fund and private equity firms and why not? Much less oppressive than The City+night life and go-go right around the corner. Then there is the Wolseley and La Caprice not to mention Dukes. I rarely find myself in or nearby Liverpool Station these days and it kinda gives me the creeps - reminding me of my first couple of years in London when I worked for lbo firm Botts & Co. on New Fetter Lane ..

While thinking about The City, here is something to ponder: Americans are saving more - in the last quarter of 2008, net-debt fell by $100 billion or 1%. Yet net worth fell by $5,000 billion or 10%. As a result, debt ratios have become worse - to better them, savings and defaults will have to rise - or governments will have to keep up the stim-u-lus.

Madeleine and I await Stan and Silver's arrival at Heathrow - on time and hurray! - then, after dropping Stan and Silver off at their hotel in South Kensington, Madeleine and I have lunch at La Brasserie. On her mind these days? A pet. Our summer holiday. And living in California, which she would like to do now or when an adult, she says.