Foreign Exchange is big business in the City of London. At the last official count, turnover on the London foreign exchange market averaged a staggering 504 billion a day. No other financial centre in the world even comes close to matching this total. Thirty one per cent of global foreign exchange activity takes place in the United Kingdom, compared with only sixteen per cent in the United States and nine per cent in Japan.However, this has not always been so. A hundred years ago, the London foreign exchange market played second fiddle to more important centres in New York, Paris an