It is believed that the Reids have retained a 25 per cent stake.More recently it is thought the board has been unhappy about the way the company was being run.The original high-street chain was built up by Eric Reid in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was known as Terleys.In 1980 the stores started to move to out-of-town sites and were rebranded under the name Texstyle World, with a more designer-led and fashionable content.. HENRY GRUNFELD, co-founder with Siegmund Warburg of SG Warburg, London’s pre-eminent post-war merchant bank, died on Thursday night at the age of 95. Mr Grunfeld continued to attend the office regularly as a consultant until last week, when he was said by a colleague to be “in good form”.
He first met Mr Warburg in Holland in 1935 after he fled his native Germany. They promptly launched a merchant bank in London called New Trading Company, later SG Warburg. Mr Grunfeld built the corporate finance side of the bank and took over its chairmanship when Mr Warburg retired in 1969.Mr Grunfeld favoured the merger with Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) in 1995 over the failed merger with Morgan Stanley.

He remained a consultant to Warburg Dillon Read (WDR).Marcel Ospel, chief executive of WDR’s owner UBS, paid tribute, saying: “I was always impressed by his depth of experience and understanding of people, and personally enjoyed his kindness and keen wit.”Sir David Scholey, for many years Warburg’s chairman, said: “He was not only a great banker and a great friend, but as the co-founder of SG Warburg… he made a unique contribution to the City and international finance.”Lord Roll, who succeeded Mr Grunfeld as chairman in 1974, remembered his sense of humour. “Two days after I joined the firm I had to go to Stockholm in connection with my earlier work. Henry said: `While you are there, why don’t you arrange for a merger between Swedish Match and Imperial Tobacco?’”Another colleague recalled a remark after Mr Grunfeld had both knees replaced three years ago: “The knees are fine – it’s just everything else that needs replacing now.”Obituary, Review page 8. CONVENTIONAL stock market wisdom has it that shares go up as money gets cheaper, and down as interest rates climb. In other words, bonds and shares move broadly in tandem; when bonds go up, shares do too and visa versa. Typically, the chain of events is that an outbreak of inflationary pressure at the end of a period of expansion will prompt a rise in interest rates, causing liquidity and credit to shrink and investment in shares and financial assets to fall.

Applying this rule of thumb to present circumstances, we should by now be looking at a quite substantial fall in share values on Wall Street. US bond yields have been rising ever since the financial crisis of late last summer. Meanwhile Alan Greenspan, who responded to that crisis with three successive cuts in short term interest rates, has shifted his stance to “a tightening bias”.
The yield on the US 30-year bond is more than 6 per cent once more and even the five-year bond isn’t far behind These are the highest levels in more than a year. The last time they were this high, the Dow was trading at little more than 9,000. US shares have been off a bit since early May, but as measured by the Dow, they are still nearly 20 per cent higher than 14 months back.This can only mean one of two things if the traditional relationship between bonds and shares still counts for anything – either shares are too high or bonds too low. For Wall Street bears, rising bond yields are powerfully indicative of a big correction to come Something similar happened before the crash of 1987. Some believe history is about to repeat itself.There are two difficulties with this theory.

The first is that the twin engines of shares and bonds actually decoupled some time ago. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 90s the relationship held good, but since July 1997 the correlation has disappeared. As share prices collapsed last autumn, for instance, bond prices soared. Indeed the effect of the recent uptick in bond yields has been to return the yield gap between shares and bonds to more usual levels.The other big problem is that the rise in longer-term bond yields is in any case a little curious. Normally the phenomenon would indicate a rise in inflationary expectations This time round, it may not be so.