Claim cb8096bbChecked 09 Jul 2026
TrueOn the truth scale
“In a busy market, people are all around you screaming and shouting at you.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
Public evidence on London trading floors in the relevant era matches this description: the Bank of England describes traders on the London International Financial Futures Exchange as moving in a "kaleidoscope of colour, movement and noise," with traders "shout[ing] out prices" in open outcry, and the London Metal Exchange still describes its open-outcry floor as central to price discovery. So the claim is accurate as a characterization of that kind of busy market. Sources: Bank of England, "What do you think about when you think about a market?"; London Metal Exchange, "The Ring." (bankofengland.co.uk)
From article
The pressure of being a market-maker in a busy market, when you’ve got people all around you screaming and shouting at you and you’re dealing in numbers and it’s like that, that, that, that – that’s pretty pressurised. That’s why it’s a young man’s job. You don’t get many 50-year-old money-brokers: they can’t do it any more. Goodness me! It’s not an easy job. Not an easy job.
When I joined the City, it was the dying days of a gentlemen’s club: magnificent, socially wonderful but going nowhere – there was still a whiff of P G Wodehouse about people who toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all. But what I saw in the Eighties and Nineties was London becoming in many ways a genuine global centre for entrepreneurial flair, for innovation, for very hard work – and for creating profits. And without those profits we can’t have the schools and hospitals we need in this country – it’s very, very simple. I am absolutely not conflicted in any way at all about the fact that what we did, overall, was for a social good.
Sources opened+ 26 search hits considered
| [1] | bankofengland.co.uk |