The City of London, that venerable bastion of sober-suited financial alchemy, has reportedly broken into a spontaneous jig of unseemly delight following the electoral drubbing of Colombia’s left-leaning presidential candidate. It seems the prospect of a socialist president in Bogotá had sent shivers down the collective spine of the Square Mile, a place where the mere whisper of ‘wealth redistribution’ is enough to curdle a fund manager’s Earl Grey.
Word from the trading floors is that the defeat of Gustavo Petro, the former rebel turned would-be president, has been greeted with the kind of relief usually reserved for the discovery that one’s offshore accounts remain untraceable. One source, speaking to your correspondent on condition of anonymity (and a rather stiff gin and tonic), described the mood as “buoyant, positively buoyant, old boy. It’s as if someone has removed a rather large and unsightly Marxist parrot from the room.”
The logic, as ever, is exquisitely simple: a leftist government might have the temerity to demand that Colombia’s vast natural resources be used for the benefit of its own people rather than for the enrichment of far-flung shareholders. It might, horror of horrors, seek to renegotiate trade deals, increase taxes on the wealthy, or even, whisper it, assert some degree of national sovereignty over its own economy.
Such notions, of course, are anathema to the gentlemen of the City, who operate on the time-honoured principle that what’s good for a hedge fund manager in Mayfair is good for the world. The defeat of Petro is thus celebrated as a victory for stability, by which they mean the stability of their own profit margins. The fact that Colombia remains one of the most unequal countries on the planet, with a state that has long been captured by a narrow elite, is a matter for polite disregard.
Your correspondent can only marvel at the chutzpah of it all. The City of London, a place that has perfected the art of extracting wealth from distant lands without the messy business of governance, now claps its hands in glee at the continuation of a status quo that suits it so nicely. One can almost hear the popping of champagne corks in the boardrooms of Canary Wharf, each pop a tiny salute to the enduring power of capital to shape politics in its own image.
But let us not be churlish. After all, if Colombia’s poor and disenfranchised must wait a little longer for a government that might actually represent their interests, well, that is a small price to pay for the continued smooth functioning of the global financial system. As one fund manager put it, with breathtaking candour: “It’s not that we’re against progress, old sport. It’s just that we’re rather in favour of our current rate of return.”
So here’s to you, City of London. May your portfolios remain robust, your tax loopholes secure, and your consciences untroubled by the inconvenient reality of a continent that still yearns for a fairer deal. The leftist threat has been seen off for now, but the ghosts of inequality have a long memory. And they know where the gin is kept.
