Monumentum aere perennius - a monument more lasting than bronze. That is probably the last piece of Latin readers of Euromoney will have to endure outside the legal page - just one, small difference between the worlds of 1969 and 1999. When Euromoney was founded in June of that year, every senior banker in London, certainly, and probably Frankfurt, Paris and Milan too would have read the works of Horace - the poet who believed his work would last longer than the statues of Rome's dignitaries.
The international capital markets are one such monument. Long after their creators are gone, the ideas they promoted - deregulation, the free movement of capital, faith in the market's ability to match buyers and sellers better than governments - will live on. Even at the markets' birth their founders realized that what they were suggesting had more profound implications than simply the invention of a few novel pieces of paper.
As reported in the first edition of Euromoney, at the inaugural meeting of the Association of International Bond Dealers (now ISMA), Robert Genillard of White Weld made an impassioned plea for governments to look beyond nationalism in their reactions to the Eurobond market, arguing: "The future of the Western world in an era of constantly growing economic interdependence and instant communications lies in accepting multinational finance."