This book could not have been written without a great deal of help and advice from City institutions as well as from colleagues in the financial press. A full list of those who have assisted would be impossibly long, but I would like to thank first the Financial Times, The Independent and the Investors Chronicle for permission to reproduce material from their respective publications and Datastream International for the use of its charts.
Detailed comments and advice on the text from John Plender and Danny O’Shea were invaluable and I am also very grateful to Liisa Springham for casting a fresh eye over the typescript. I had the benefit of information and advice on individual sections from, among others, Adrienne Gleeson, Andrew Goodrick-Clarke, Helen Fearnley and Peter Wilson-Smith and considerable help from Prudential Assurance, The Takeover Panel and the press offices of The London Stock Exchange and the Securities and Investments Board. I am also grateful to Hugh Partridge and Brian Roy for technical help with the second and third editions. Many of those already named helped again with the fourth edition and I also very much appreciate Susan Bevan’s helpful comments.
For the fifth edition I would again like to thank many of those mentioned above, and particularly acknowledge the help given by Capital DATA Bondware and Capital DATA Loanware with the euromarkets chapter. And I am very grateful to Antonia Oprita for reading the print-out and picking up my more careless errors and omissions. The views expressed – and the mistakes that remain – are my own.