David Mayhew - Chairman of JP Morgan Cazenove

On Friday I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture given by David Mayhew the chairman of JP Morgan Cazenove. It was a good lecture - David covered his early life - how he got stared in banking through to where he is today. Like many successful men he rests a lot in the value of hard work and is wise enough to have stressed a few times the role of luck in his career.

I won't attempt to cover what David covered in his lecture in any way - what I will enumerate is a few points that he covered that I found particularly interesting and have thought about afterwards. Because a blog is not a fixed thing I may well add to this later as I think about what he said.

• Monopolies are hard to break. He mentioned this in the context of the 15 years it took to replace the old system of Jobbers and Brokers - wikipedia covers the "Big Bang" here.
• Reputation is very important. This is something I have thought about a fair bit over the years.
• The next decade will not be as good as the past one.
• If you loose control of costs you loose control of decision making.
• Quantative easing will inevitably produce inflation.
• Quantitive easing was necessary to provide liquidity to the banks.
• Qualitative easing has helped to provoke the bubble in the emerging markets. This is because it has provoked a rush of money into these markets.
• Politicians are not being straight when they fail to tell us that basically we will be worse off.
• It takes 10 years for a mine to be developed and be productive - if you are interested in mining stocks this is worth thinking about.
• There is plenty of iron ore in the world - the problem is mining capacity.
• Transparency is important. If I understand things correctly then he believes that a key role of regulation is to introduce transparency. Transparency leads to confidence which is important for investment.

I guess that low interest rates are a part of what is pushing money into emerging markets.

Updated 20-feb-2010