In the summer of 1969 Euromoney published its first issue. The magazine broadened its coverage over time, but in its first few years focused exclusively on the foreign currencies and bonds being traded in the City of London. The editor was a page short of copy when he arrived at the printer, so on the spot he wrote a back-page satire in the voice of a letter home from Herbie, an American sent to London to open an office for the Last National Bank of Boot Hill. It became a regular feature.
Herbie loves his mum and hates warm gin. He’s written as a quiet American, a rube with too much power and too little sense, sweet but unable to find most anything on a map now that he’s left the US. And in February of 1973 he arrives late to his office on Moorgate to discover his local foreign exchange and bond dealers annoyed with him. He has been neglecting their most important new customers: the Arabs, and as poor Herbie writes it, the “Librans”.
Oil was about $3.60 a barrel in early 1973. In the summer it rose to about $4.30. There’s a dawning sense in the pages of Euromoney that year that there was a new source of wealth in the world, it had to go somewhere, and that somewhere might as well be the City of London. In September of that year a headline in the magazine abandoned all subtlety and asked, simply, “What will the Arabs do with their money?”