Outlook: End of the road for 'old' City as another famous brand dies

For anyone with a sense of City history, the death of the Warburgs name is something of a defining moment. Few of the names that dominated the City before Big Bang still exist, but if at the time you had been forced to bet on one with the staying power to carry on, SG Warburg, once a byword for all that was best in British merchant banking, would have been high on everyone's list.

SG Warburg was long ago subsumed within Swiss Banking Corporation, which in turn was then subsumed within Union Bank of Switzerland. Even so, the Warburg name continued to live on as the second half of the group's global investment banking brand. Now Warburgs too will follow the wealth of other "old" City names into the dustbin of history, another victim of the brand consultants. Research in 14 countries has discovered the name to be worthless and therefore dispensable.

I doubt very much that Siegmund Warburg, the firm's founder and long standing inspiration will be turning in his grave over the disappearance of his nameplate. He was not a sentimental man and would have recognised better than most the purging and destructive market forces that have laid waste to so much of the old City.

All the same, there is a certain shame in the fact that not a single British name from the old guard managed to make the leap, as the City as a whole did, from small, parochial player to one of the globally dominant behemoths that today rule the capital markets. SG Warburg was our best hope, and for a while it looked as if Sir David Scholey, a worthy successor to Sir Siegmund's mantle, might pull it off. That he failed was not all down to the British incompetence that was said to reign supreme in the City before it opened its doors to all comers.

It was also to do with unfair competition from the US. The British surrender took place in two phases. In the immediate aftermath of Big Bang in 1986, most partners simply held up their hands, sold out and retired to the country with the labradors. It was a neat trick, for most of these firms weren't worth a sausage and those who bought them ended up losing their shirts. Others, like SG Warburg, declared their intention to stand and fight, and eventually to become a bulge bracket firm themselves.

It may always have been a doomed endeavour. In the next phase of invasion, the Americans came with their fat cheque books and so horrendously bid up the cost of staying in business that firms without the cash cow of the US market to fall back on found it impossible to compete. The City had been made open to all comers, but were Warburgs and others allowed reciprocal rights to the hugely lucrative Wall Street underwriting cartel? That remained a closed shop and still is. Sir Siegmund would have understood why his name is going, but his legacy was robbed, none the less.

Finance reporting

Much beating of chests and climbing on high horses at a conference in London yesterday on financial journalism and the apparent determination of both legislators and regulators to undermine the way in which we operate. It is, however, a measure of the importance that editors and financial journalists attach to these issues that no fewer that five news organisations - The Independent, the Financial Times, The Guardian, Reuters and The Times - were willing to call a halt to normal hostilities, for a few hours at least, jointly to sponsor and attend such a conference.

The sub-text for this rare get together of editors is that while we have been out and about pursuing out legitimate business as financial reporters – that is reporting, commenting on and analysing the daily cut and thrust of commerce and markets - the regulators have been creeping up on us unawares, and we now find ourselves surrounding by a whole panoply of powers, rules and regulations which are already beginning to look highly dangerous to the interests of a free press.

The Financial Services Act, which gives the Financial Services Authority carte blanche to do more or less whatever it likes in pursuit of market abuse, is one such piece of legislation. Another is the European Market Abuse Directive (Mad), which specifically includes financial journalists in its market abuse regime. Concern over these powers has been heightened by the recent Interbrew case, where the press has been subjected to heavy handed judicial and FSA pressure to deliver up source documents relating to an alleged instance of market abuse.

Regulators and legislators don't generally set out to trample all over press freedoms, but in their pursuit of financial malfeasance this is sometimes the effect. Furthermore, there is an in-built tendency in the courts and at the FSA to believe that the pursuit of market abuse overrides any other public interest, freedom of the press being one of them. The FSA doesn't much like the rumour, gossip and hearsay that underscores so much stock market activity, and it doesn't seem to want us to report it either. It would much rather financial pages were filled with a mixture of sanitised press releases and investigative exposes of Enron type corporate and financial scandals.

Well sorry guys, but the real world just ain't like that. We'd love to bring you more Enrons, but we are certainly not going to do it while threatened at every turn by the prying eyes of Big Brother FSA, wanting to know who our sources are, worrying about whether we are disseminating a falsehood, or faffing around over whether we are misleading our readers into buying the wrong share.

The best safeguard against market abuse is not intrusive regulation, but transparency. The financial press may not be all it should be, but warts and all, it is the best mechanism we've got for ensuring the speedy disclosure of trustworthy information. The FSA says it is on the same side as the financial press. We are, after all, both meant to be watchdogs. But in truth we are worlds apart. Officialdom versus freedom of information. That's the real clash here and you don't need to be a financial journalist to know which must triumph.

MG Rover

Old dogs cannot be taught new tricks and MG Rover's latest attempt to cuddle up to an alliance partner looks like ending as miserably as all its previous efforts.

When the deal with the inaccurately named China Brilliance was unveiled in March, MG Rover could not find enough superlatives to describe the huge cost savings and market opportunities this long-term strategic alliance promised. China is looking anything but Brilliant now. The chairman, Yang Rong, is in exile in the US struggling to clear his name of charges of "economic crimes" , Meanwhile, shares in the sister company, China Brilliance Automotive, have been suspended in Hong Kong.

In between dodging an arrest warrant issued by Liaoning province, in China, Mr Yang found time to drop into Longbridge three weeks ago and reassure MG Rover that everything was tickety-boo. Understandably, the chief executive Kevin Howe is far from reassured. In the meantime, the China Brilliance tie-up has suddenly become less strategically important than it was. Eight months ago it was "a wide ranging global alliance that spans the full-breadth of both companies' activities". Now it hardly matters at all.

MG Rover says that even if the deal collapsed altogether, it would have little impact on strategy because Longbridge already has the funding and development in place to launch a new medium-sized car. What MG Rover really means is that it still has £300m left of the dowry BMW handed over to the Phoenix consortium when the Germans pulled the plug two and a half years ago. Even so, Rover is not cutting its losses as quickly as promised when it rose from the ashes. Production will be lower this year too.

Rover has gamely attempted to rebrand itself as a niche player with ever more exotic and implausible MG super models, but the fact is that it needs a partner to survive. At the moment it is low on the Government's radar of accidents waiting to happen. But watch this space.

jeremy.warner@independent.co.uk