We do live in nervous times, don’t we? On Monday at about 12.25pm, 2 per cent was wiped off all big UK property stocks when thick smoke engulfed the London skyline, according to a JPMorgan analysts’ note. The price recovered within minutes when the market decided that it was merely a disused warehouse at a building site for the Olympic Games going up in flames, rather than the start of a terrorist campaign. The situation wasn’t helped by the market pundit who likened the scene to the detonation of a nuclear bomb. That’s about £56 million off the sector because someone dropped a fag, then.

These are nervous times, too, on world oil markets, so there was great anticipation at the World Energy Congress jamboree in Rome over a rare speech by Saudi Aramco’s president and chief executive Abdallah Jum’ah on global oil resources and the world’s energy future. What reassurance could the world’s biggest oil producer provide a rapt audience? Jum’ah spoke about Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan heavy oil, the potential for oil shale, coal-to-liquids technology and biofuels. Every fuel resource on the planet was dissected, except Saudi oil. Indeed, Saudi Arabia was never mentioned, in an hour-long speech. But he did say that the world had no need to worry about running out of oil. So that’s all right, then.

MI5:Protect and clothe

MI5, aka the Security Service, has patented “clothing, footwear and headgear” under the MI5 name with the UK Intellectual Property Office. It was done last year by the previous director-general, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, through a well-known firm of patent lawyers. The spooks don’t talk to the press, but this is to ensure someone doesn’t have the bright idea of turning out a range of leisurewear with the MI5 name on it. “It’s to protect the logo,” says the Home Office. Obviously, I know a lot more about this than I am letting on. But if I told you, I would probably have to kill you.

Credit crunch yet to reach all parts

Only for the very rich and the very, very stupid, the credit card with diamonds embedded in it, costing 300 times more than conventional cards and being marketed by a South Korean bank to “VVIP customers” and the “über-rich”. About 1,000 are on their way to that oasis of bling, Dubai, there is a regional office in Kazakhstan and the bank is after equally gullible parts of the rest of the world. Come March 2009, once the world financial system has finally imploded and we’re all huddled around bombsite fires, in rags and subsisting on baked beans straight from the tin, the above may seem a quaint memento of a distant era.

Spotted outside Mansion House yesterday, a 38-tonne articulated lorry taking down the gilded VIP enclosure that had been used for the Lord Mayor’s Show. It was parked blamelessly on Walbrook but had still somehow attracted a parking ticket.

Poach staff then bring to boil in High Court

The bonds world has been buzzing with rumours for a couple of weeks about a legal action that is coming to the High Court today over a poaching raid on Terry Smith’s Tullett Prebon by GFI, an American rival. Such raids, and resulting legal actions, are regular occurrences, but this one seems to have gone more sour than usual. It concerns Jevin Davis, a US national poached by GFI from Tullett, and there are lots of lurid details on salaries being waved around.

No one is saying anything, but it seems Tullett is bringing an injunction to ensure Davis’s contract is adhered to and he doesn’t move across too quickly. One is inclined to knock their heads together, but bond broking firms take it all terribly seriously. I would only point out that the last time their affairs were aired in the High Court was in 2002, when Cantor Fitzgerald sued Michael Spencer’s Icap over a poaching raid. No one came out of it terribly well.

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