HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT THINGS don’t really seem to work at the moment? Perhaps you have been to Accident and Emergency recently, or tried to catch a train, or are watching the general crisis engulfing British universities. There is lots of dysfunction to go around. Scepticism about claims of a zeitgeist — invariably an argument wrapped up as an observation — is usually correct. Nevertheless, in Britain in 2024 it is very tempting to identify the spirit of the age as the fact that things mostly used to work and now they mostly do not. Why this has happened is perhaps the great question of our times.
Dan Davies, a former Bank of England economist and investment bank analyst turned journalist and commentator, thought he, is one of the best studies of financial fraud. What marks it out is its analytical depth, the way that it examines what fraud is and how it works conceptually. What better preparation could there be for a study of why things have gone so wrong?
