Nothing gets up a City banker's nose more than the suggestion that the financial services industry in this country could one day go the same way as other once great British industries such as shipbuilding or coal mining. Somehow the notion has taken root that financial services - the biggest single industry in the private sector - is immune from the hurricanes that have ripped through other sectors. The City, we are frequently told, is too ingenious, too energetic, too well entrenched - too damned good, in fact - to lose its way. It has, after all, remained pre-eminent for 300-odd years, serving not just domestic customers, but clients around the world.
Unlike those bolshie miners and shipbuilders, the City, it is argued, has the vision to move with the times. That is why whole trading floors of dealers are currently being sacked. It is why City pay for many this year will be a fraction of the norm. With such flexibility, the glass and marble towers of the Square Mile and Canary Wharf will continue to grow and grow.
But I wonder whether something more fundamental has changed. Clients - be they small private investors or big companies - are beginning to see the entire edifice as little more than a scam designed to part them from their money.
Woody Allen's joke that a stockbroker is a man who invests your money until it's all gone has been not much less than the truth for many. Trust has vanished and will not be easily re-established.
The unprecedented bull market of 1980 to 2000 disguised the reality that the City was paying itself too much for no more than mediocre results. The following three-year bear market has exposed many as greedy, complacent and sometimes barely competent. Some have been plain dishonest. In Bangalore and Bombay, eager, bright, English-speaking graduates work in call-centres carrying out the instructions of the British customers of HSBC and the Prudential. They do it for a third of the cost of their UK counterparts.
They happily mug up on the latest EastEnders plotline and keep tabs on the British weather so that they can make small talk. Customers aren't even aware that they are talking to someone on the other side of the world. So far, the jobs exported have been mundane. But in 25 years' time, it is possible that the children of those Indian call-centre workers will have seized the more complex work of their counterparts in London (and, for that matter, Wall Street).
Is it entirely preposterous to imagine them (or workers in other emerging economies) carrying out billion-dollar capital-raisings, masterminding blue-chip mergers and managing the west's pensions? Perhaps the most powerful nations will always ensure that they run the world's money. But if there were a free market in financial services - the industry that likes to lecture the rest of us on the benefits of the free market - then it would surely be looking for a new home.
Merger talks between the broadcasters Granada and Carlton are back on. The timing of the announcement says far more about the job insecurity of the two protagonists - Charles Allen at Granada and Michael Green at Carlton - than about the imminence of a single ITV plc.
Both are under pressure from their shareholders. Their share prices have collapsed. They have jointly flushed away £1.2bn in the disastrous ITV Digital experiment. In the race to woo viewers, they have been humiliated by the BBC, BSkyB and Channel 5. And the advertising famine shows no sign of lifting.
Allen and Green are desperate to deliver on the promise of something. The truth is that their merger plans are currently illegal and only a new Communications Act (which is probably still a year away from the statute books) will enable them to push through a full-scale merger. Just as pertinent is the ambiguous response of their ultimate paymasters, the big advertisers.
They like the idea of the simplicity of doing business with a single ITV rather than faffing about with different regions. But they hate the idea of the monopolistic power that a single ITV plc might wield. A combined Granada/Carlton would take more than half of all TV advertising revenues. The detergents group Procter & Gamble, one of the biggest ad spenders in Britain, is already harrumphing.
Allen and Green are dreaming up a device to keep competition (or at least the appearance of competition) alive in TV advertising sales. No details have emerged, but it seems likely that Carlton's ad-sales wing will be spun off into a supposedly independent operation. An army of lawyers, financiers and accountants at £300 an hour is at work on ways to create an artificial construct sufficient to satisfy the competition authorities.
All that awesome brainpower, creativity and cunning, and it won't make a pennyworth of difference to the problem really sinking the two companies: the deteriorating quality of their programmes.
