“The cold shoulder” – Dan Davies
“The cold-shoulder order was very infrequently used indeed, because people were so terrified of it. It simply involved publishing a notice that a particular person or firm was to be cold-shouldered. And the understanding was that if you worked with or for someone subject to the cold-shoulder, you would be cold-shouldered yourself. Because everyone knew that the big and important banks which formed the backbone of the Panel would always respect the cold-shoulder, it had a sort of viral property; nobody who relied on being able to work with Barclays would touch anyone who was cold-shouldered, so nobody who relied on being able to work with one of those firms would dare to, and so on; basically, anyone who got cold-shouldered would be completely shut out of the financial industry”