There was certainly hubris at Number Twenty. “What do they say about hubris and nemesis?” pondered the unconvinced insider who had taken me into the club.
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They had allowed a series of US subprime mortgage companies to fuel the financial crisis from which the world was still reeling. Their 21st-century successors, by contrast, had been found badly wanting. They had been the watchdogs of capitalism who had exposed its excesses. KPMG’s founders had made their names forging a worldwide profession charged with accounting for business. Gazing down on the refreshed executives are neo-pop art portraits of the men whose initials form today’s KPMG: Piet Klynveld (an early 20th-century Amsterdam accountant), William Barclay Peat and James Marwick (Victorian Scottish accountants) and Reinhard Goerdeler (a German concentration-camp survivor who built his country’s leading accountancy firm). On another, a cocktail bar leads out on to a roof terrace. On one floor are dining rooms and cabinets stocked with fine wines. Inside, Number Twenty is patrolled by a small army of attractive, sharply uniformed serving staff. It was evidently a price worth paying to look after the right people. The cost of the 15-year lease on the five-storey building was undisclosed, but would have been many tens of millions of pounds. It was, said the firm’s then UK chairman Simon Collins in the fluent corporate-speak favoured by today’s top accountants, “a West End space” for clients “to meet, mingle and touch down”. Nestled among the hedge-fund managers on Grosvenor Street in Mayfair, Number Twenty had recently been opened by accountancy firm KPMG. I n the summer of 2015, seven years after the financial crisis and with no end in sight to the ensuing economic stagnation for millions of citizens, I visited a new club.