There is growing impatience with President George Bush in the business community. This is not because he may be about to unleash his bombs on Iraq. It is because he won't - how can I put this delicately? - just get on with it and press the button at once.
A common view in the City is that either he should go ahead and attack, or that he should retreat, but he must stop this shilly-shallying. The share market can cope well with war or with peace. So can industry. It is the prolonged uncertainty that is so debilitating. Don't Bush, Blair and the UN realise that the really important business of, well, business, is being disrupted by all this alternate sabre-rattling and diplomacy?
The eminent economist Professor Tim Congdon dismisses the entire affair as "a minor example of international policing", an irrelevant worry over "a pipsqueak nation", but one which is now quite wrongly having "a major effect on the world economy". Saddam is indeed an economic nonentity. Iraq's annual output puts it somewhere between gnats like Luxembourg and Morocco. Yet a conflict may reduce world growth by as much as 0.5 per cent - $100bn - because business leaders are postponing decisions on investments.
The City bookie David Buik of Cantor Index, who has grown impatient of seeing his clients sitting on the sidelines waiting, is rather more blunt. "S**t, or get off the pot!" is his advice to the west and the UN. I'm not so sure that the Iraq crisis is the only impediment to a recovery in confidence and investment spending. If Saddam were toppled tomorrow, shares would no doubt momentarily rally, but not by much. Some business projects would be dusted down, but again, not that many. There are deeper, more enduring anxieties in boardrooms - serious overcapacity, painful deflation and yawning employee pension liabilities, to name three. Iraq is a marvellous excuse for inactivity among company chiefs blinking in the headlights and wondering what on earth to do next.
Talk about unfortunate coincidences. The other day the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Ruth Kelly, published her proposals for getting us all to save more. The same day, a team of London Business School number-crunchers came up with one of the most gloomy forecasts for investment returns in decades.
Kelly let it be known that the centrepiece of the savings proposals - a 1 per cent cap on annual charges levied by the industry on savers in a new range of government-approved products - would be reviewed. In other words, to the delight of the life assurance and pensions industry, she may allow them to charge more than 1 per cent.
The centrepiece of the LBS findings was the startling forecast - based on a century of historical data - that the stock market will take at least 15 years just to recover to its high of late 1999. If the LBS is right, the stock market is destined to grow at an average of just 4.7 per cent per year.
The City wants to skim off more than one-fifth of that gain each year. Even at the 1 per cent proposed by Kelly, it will, over the 30-year lifetime of a savings product, have creamed off one-third of all the investor's gains. In the past, 1 per cent did not look too greedy. Today's low-inflation, low-return world dramatically alters the sums. Kelly should stick to the 1 per cent cap.
Some City bigwigs have little notion of the wisdom of being seen to suffer alongside their shareholders. Thus Sir Mark Weinberg, chairman of St James's Place Capital, chose to deliver a profits warning this month from the Caribbean, where he is on holiday. Sir Mark, who is paid £308,000 a year for a two-and-a-half-day week, compounded the sin by having no grasp of the precise details of what has gone wrong at the company he heads.
By any standard, this looks like breathtaking contempt, not only for St James's shareholders but also for the millions of small shareholders of the old Halifax group HBOS, which owns most of St James's and picks up the tab for its mistakes.
Recent events in Paris gave a taste of things to come at the Bank of England, should we ever join the euro. The staff of the Banque de France threatened to strike, in protest at 3,200 job cuts - 40 per cent of the workforce - planned for the central bank. There is not much left to do at the Banque now monetary policy has shifted to Frankfurt.
Sadly, a similar cull would be necessary at the Bank of England if we ever dump the pound. The big question is what we would do with the windowless Sir John Soane structure, which covers three and a half acres on Threadneedle Street. I favour flooding the vaults and turning them into a giant public swimming pool, while retaining the governor's lawn in the middle for sunbathing.
Patrick Hosking is deputy City editor of the London Evening Standard
