China winning the 21st century, so far

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During the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 a bunch of us journalists were standing in the Telegraph newsroom watching the slightly sinister scenes being beamed in on television from China.

The Telegraph had – and still has – what at the time was described as a “state of the art” hub and spoke office layout, designed to be ahead of the curve in the bright, glorious digital future which was said to be coming our way. In reality the new office was mainly hype-driven media marketing drivel, because hub and spoke only meant there was a large round table in the middle of the vast newsroom surrounded by giant television screens on tall poles, and from there rows of desks containing the hard-pressed and rightly cynical hacks. The Telegraph was owned by the infamous Barclay Brothers whose over-leveraged business empire would more than a decade later go splat against the wall when interest rates went up.

The newsroom had been the trading floor of Salomon in the 1980s and Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and many more books since about assorted disasters, worked there when it was the largest trading floor in Europe, before it became a newspaper office.

I’ve probably told versions of this story before, about the Telegraph and the Olympics in China, and apologies if it is familiar to regular readers. After more than ten years of this newsletter appearing in various formats and outlets, it would be unsurprising if there wasn’t occasional repetition.

The reason that scene – the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on 8 August 2008 – comes to mind from time to time is that nearly two decades later it symbolises what with hindsight can be seen as a pivoting moment. China was on the rise and we in the West were about to be on the slide, though we didn’t know it yet. Our financial crisis had started the year before in 2007 and a month after the Olympics it would explode into the worst peacetime shock perhaps since 1929 and certainly since the twin oil crises of the 1970s.