Londoners tend to think their city is the centre of the universe, but for three days in early November this fiction became a reality as BTG GN members gathered for our 2012 World meeting.
Spending time in London with overseas visitors is to see the UK’s capital through different eyes. When those eyes belong to insolvency practitioners from all over the world, the risk is that the view will inevitably be jaundiced, especially when these vampires of the recession start comparing their countries’ financial woes and the incompetence of their political leaders.
The name of Venice’s airport prepares visitors nicely for the impracticalities of getting around one of the world’s most charismatic cities. Surely Marco Polo must have faced as many obstacles on the Silk Road as unwary tourists here, from marauding brigands (for which read touts for the wildly expensive cafes and restaurants in the Piazza San Marco) and local warlords exacting a high tariff for safe passage (the €110 water taxi ride into the City).
Leaving a storm-threatened UK for a balmy, late summer day in Warsaw seemed the perfect metaphor for the comparative strengths of the two economies. Poland continues to be a minor but extremely creditable financial miracle.
Flying into a quiet Berlin’s Tegel Airport less than a week after Germany shocked itself and the world by announcing a shuddering halt to its previous strong climb out of recession was a first step into a world of strange uncertainty.
Escaping from the rolling road block of the M5 motorway into picturesque Devon in a warm August rain squall promised a voyage of discovery into the delights of this year’s must-take tourist activity in austerity-battered UK, the great British staycation.
China imported 33.5m bottles of Bordeaux wines worth $475m in 2010. No wonder the price of an average 2008 Grand Cru Classé at a small St Emilion merchant’s tasting outlet defies current European economic logic at an eye watering €49 a bottle. With the nouveau riche from India and Russia adding to the upward price pressure, Bordeaux can afford at least for the moment to ignore the complaints of budget-conscious developed-world wine buffs that claret is no longer affordable. The world still drinks 14 bottles of the stuff every second.
When we received a request late last week from BTG GN member Zoltan Tenk at Noerr & Partner in Budapest for help in finding a lawyer to advise a Hungarian client about issues in Yemen, even my internationalist eyebrows were raised.
Arriving in New York immediately after the stratospheric success of the public listing of LinkedIn Corp when the stock doubled in price on the first day’s trading, the temptation was to ask whether investors’ memories really are so short that the dot.com bust of 2001 has already become pre-history. A near repeat initial performance only days later in the Pandora Radio IPO made cynical observers recall the old cliché about boxes and their contents. Fortunately common sense prevailed and Pandora ended its first day up by only 9%.
Despite the efforts of yet another Icelandic volcano to ruin the party for a second successive year, over thirty of our network friends from 16 different countries came together in Cyprus at the end of May to renew old friendships and make new ones.