ABSTRACT
The title of my paper derives from Brian Winterflood, one of the London Stock Exchange's most prominent market makers (formerly known as jobbers) in the last two decades. 'The people that were behind it, I always say,' he reflected in 1996 on the City of London's revolution of the 1980s, 'were the banks and the Yanks. The banks because they knew they had to get into the new global game, the Yanks because they seemed to have unlimited funds and they came rushing in like the cavalry, throwing their dollars around. ...5l The fundamental restructuring of the City's hitherto very traditional securities industry was an astonishingly rapid process which essentially took place between 1983 and 1986, and its inner history remains to be written. Indeed the task has hardly been started. What follows is little more than a survey of our existing state of knowledge, focusing mainly on banks, British and foreign, which in very short order had to decide what their response was going to be to an unprecedented opportunity or, according to taste, danger. 'Big Bang' has been the subject of many myths, despite the excellence of a handful of full-length accounts that appeared at the time or very soon afterwards.2 Now, some eleven years on, it is time to attempt to begin the move from journalism to history.
