Deciphering The 'Priestly Mumbo-Jumbo' Of The Financial World
One of the threads in the book is to do with the oddness of money, you know, a thing that makes people go slightly nuts is when they start thinking about where does money come from? Where does its value come from? Why is it worth what it's worth, especially when it's digital ones and zeroes, dots on the screen that seem so fragile. They seem fictional, we seem to have willed their meaning into being, and yet the meanings are so consequential it shapes the texture of everyday life. So I'm very interested in that thing of the materiality of money, when you can trace money back to actual stuff. It's dug out of a hole in the ground, somebody stamps an image on it, people agree what that coin with the image is worth, and then you trade with it.
On how being a banker's son affected his entry into the world of money
A lot of people I talk to, they feel kind of defeated in advance, they feel kind of pre-baffled ... and because my dad worked for a bank — I mean, it's not the modern fancy-schmancy investment banking, it's much more the old kind of, what they used to call the 3-6-3 model, which is that you take deposits at 3 percent, you lend money at 6 percent, and you're on the golf course by 3 o'clock — and the bank he worked for is now a very big global bank, HSBC, it was then a sleepy colonial institution, Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. So I remember him coming back at some point saying, you know, his boss ... just bought a bank ... and that helped me understand that it's just like anything else, it's people who are sometimes smart, sometimes dumb, sometimes lucky, sometimes not, making bets, backing their hunches, and that I could get my head round it if I tried.
Read an excerpt of How to Speak Money