Tullett Prebon, Terry Smith’s bonds broking business, has ratcheted up the legal pressure on its rival BGC Partners in the United States by invoking the so-called Rico statute, originally created to combat the Mafia, which increases fines available to the loser in a law suit. The two hate each other and Tulletts is taking action against BGC in New Jersey and in the High Court in London over allegations that its rival tried to poach staff in both places.

The London action is on hold until November 4 after BGC’s counsel fell ill. The New Jersey case continues. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (Rico) Act was passed in 1970 as an attempt to extirpate organised crime. It means that any fines imposed can be trebled, and other costs awarded. But in the 1980s clever lawyers extended the principle to civil actions.

This means that if BGC loses, it could cost more than $1 billion in damages, a potentially crippling blow. BGC is contesting the action and believes the figures quoted to be “fanciful”.

Bankers are understandably nervous and some are turning to a former US military hard nut for lessons in how to become trained killers. Tim Larkin runs a business that offers courses charmingly titled “How To Kill” and has trained various bankers from big American firms who are worried about self-defence and prepared to use the ultimate option. He is, apparently, planning a trip to London in the new year to train their City brethren. You have been warned.

A colleague is wandering around a Homebase store one weekend. It is oddly dark. A quarter of the lights are off. They are saving on the power bill, he is told. I ring Home Retail Group, owner of Homebase and Argos, and they confirm this. When it is sunny outside, they turn out the lights. I know times are hard, but has it really come to this?

Crisis talk over? Normal political service resumes

Sir Howard Davies has been mulling the responses to the financial crisis. Now running the London School of Economics, he writes in Quantum, published by the Qatar Financial Centre, that “in the academic world, that debate continues, but there are signs that elsewhere normal service has been resumed; in other words people are retreating to the positions they held before things began to go wrong”. For Gordon Brown, “the crisis, like Bruce Springsteen, was Born in the USA”, while the French talk gleefully of the crisis of Anglo-Saxon capitalisation”.

Bowing out gracefully

In the blue corner: Robert Swannell

The veteran investment banker Robert Swannell is retiring from Citigroup today. Robert William Ashburnham Swannell, 59 next month, is one of a coterie of bankers who emerged from Schroders in the 1980s. Staying with the bank after the Citigroup takeover in 2000, he worked for Marks & Spencer, defending the group against Sir Philip Green’s unwanted takeover in 2004, and for Safeway before it was bought by Wm Morrison.

He was appointed chairman of HMV a year ago, admitting an unexpected fondness for the works of Bob Dylan and, more plausibly, for Graham Greene. More recently, he was involved in persuading Simon Fox, his chief executive, not to move across to ITV, where he was on the list of potential chief executives. A qualified barrister, Swannell is also deputy chairman of the Governing Body of his alma mater, Rugby School. Expect news in due course of his appointment to the chairman’s seat at the appropriate FTSE 100 company.

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