Other People’s Money

Other People’s Money Plot Summary

Introduction

Finance has undergone a profound transformation over recent decades, evolving from an industry that primarily served the real economy into one increasingly focused on trading with itself. This shift represents a fundamental change in how financial institutions operate and their relationship with society. Where finance once existed to facilitate payments, direct savings toward productive investments, allocate capital efficiently, and help households manage financial security, today's financial system has largely abandoned these functions in favor of self-referential trading activities that generate enormous profits for insiders while delivering questionable value to the broader economy. The consequences of this transformation extend far beyond the financial sector itself. The dominance of trading over service has created a financial system characterized by excessive complexity, misaligned incentives, and dangerous fragility. Financial institutions have become disconnected from the real economic needs they should serve, while imposing enormous costs on society through periodic crises and continuous resource extraction. Understanding this financialization process—how it happened, why it matters, and what can be done about it—is essential for anyone concerned with creating an economy that works for everyone rather than primarily benefiting a small financial elite.

Chapter 1: The Transformation of Finance: From Service to Self-Interest

The financial sector has undergone a profound transformation over recent decades, shifting from an industry primarily focused on serving the real economy to one increasingly preoccupied with itself. This transformation represents a fundamental change in the purpose and function of finance in modern society. The traditional role of finance—connecting savers with borrowers, facilitating payments, and helping manage risks—has been increasingly overshadowed by trading activities that generate profits primarily for financial institutions themselves rather than serving broader economic needs. This shift began with deregulation and technological changes that enabled new trading practices and financial instruments. Traditional relationship banking gave way to transaction-based finance. Bank managers who once knew their customers personally were replaced by traders who rarely left their screens. The culture changed too—from one of prudence and service to one celebrating risk-taking and short-term profits. Financial institutions that had existed for centuries transformed their business models, often with catastrophic results. The rise of the trader fundamentally altered how finance operated. In the past, financial professionals maintained relationships with clients and companies they served. The average holding period for shares was measured in years. Today, high-frequency trading algorithms hold positions for milliseconds. Companies have built specialized infrastructure to reduce transmission time between financial centers by fractions of a millisecond—investments that would be worthless in any context except one where trading speed itself creates profit. This transformation coincided with changes in business organization. Partnerships and mutuals, where owners had unlimited liability and carefully monitored risk, converted to public companies. When Goldman Sachs became a public company in 1999, some partners became hundreds of millions richer. These structural changes reduced risk aversion and enabled more aggressive trading strategies, as decision-makers could capture the upside of risky bets while limiting their exposure to potential losses. The consequences extended far beyond finance itself. Corporate executives increasingly focused on "shareholder value" and stock prices rather than long-term business development. Income inequality increased dramatically, particularly in countries where financialization was most advanced. Meanwhile, median household income barely increased in real terms, with consumption maintained through expanded consumer credit and home equity extraction—financial innovations that ultimately proved unsustainable. When the global financial crisis erupted in 2007-2008, it revealed how deeply financialization had transformed society. The crisis wasn't merely a financial event but the inevitable result of a system that had diverted resources from productive uses toward speculative trading, replaced relationships with transactions, and prioritized short-term gains over long-term stability. The transformation of finance from service to self-interest had created a system that was both unstable and increasingly disconnected from the real economy it was meant to serve.

Chapter 2: The Illusion of Liquidity and the Trading Obsession

The concept of liquidity dominates discussions in financial markets, yet it remains poorly understood and frequently misrepresented. Liquidity essentially refers to the ability to convert assets into cash quickly without significantly affecting their price. Financial markets create the impression that assets can always be bought or sold without disruption. However, this impression is largely an illusion—one that has profound implications for how financial markets function and the risks they create. Financial markets create the appearance of liquidity through two mechanisms: maintaining inventories of assets and temporarily diverting supplies from other uses. However, this liquidity is inherently limited. If everyone tried to sell their investments simultaneously, most would be unable to do so without catastrophic price declines. The system works only because most participants believe they can access their money whenever needed, and few actually attempt to do so at the same time. This creates what economists call a "fallacy of composition"—what is possible for any individual becomes impossible if everyone acts similarly. The trading culture that dominates modern finance has shifted focus from understanding underlying assets to predicting other traders' behavior. Traders typically know little about the companies, currencies, or commodities they trade, but a great deal about other traders and what they currently think. This creates a self-referential world where prices reflect not fundamental value but estimates of what others think others think is valuable—what Keynes famously compared to a newspaper beauty contest where judges pick not the most beautiful contestant but the one they think other judges will prefer. High-frequency trading exemplifies this disconnect from economic fundamentals. These traders, who may account for more than half of all stock transactions, make no contribution to market liquidity in any meaningful sense. They provide no capital to the market and typically close their positions at the end of each day. Their activity resembles ticket scalpers trading with each other rather than genuine investors providing patient capital to businesses. The enormous resources devoted to gaining microsecond advantages in trading speed represent a pure social waste—investments that create private profits without corresponding social benefits. The obsession with liquidity has diverted attention from the fundamental purpose of capital markets: to allocate resources efficiently to productive uses. End-users of finance—households, businesses, governments—have modest requirements for liquidity that could be met if markets opened once a week or even once a month. The demand for extreme liquidity—the capacity to trade every millisecond—comes from financial professionals themselves, not from the needs of the real economy. The mantra that trading provides liquidity to markets often means little more than trading facilitates more trading. This liquidity illusion becomes particularly dangerous when market participants build business models that depend on its continuous availability. Financial institutions increasingly rely on short-term funding to support long-term assets, creating maturity mismatches that become unsustainable when market liquidity evaporates. This structural vulnerability was starkly exposed during the global financial crisis when seemingly liquid markets suddenly froze, forcing central banks to intervene massively to prevent complete financial collapse. The trading obsession had created a system that appeared robust during normal conditions but proved catastrophically fragile under stress.

Chapter 3: Financial Complexity and Its Destabilizing Effects

Financial complexity has grown exponentially in recent decades, creating a system that is increasingly opaque, interconnected, and vulnerable to cascading failures. This complexity manifests in multiple dimensions: intricate financial instruments, convoluted institutional structures, and dense networks of relationships between financial entities. Far from enhancing stability through sophisticated risk management, this complexity has made the financial system fundamentally more fragile and prone to crisis. Complex financial instruments often obscure rather than distribute risk. Products like collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs) were designed to slice, repackage, and transfer risk. However, their complexity made it virtually impossible for market participants—including those who created and traded them—to fully understand the underlying risks. When housing prices declined and mortgage defaults increased, these instruments began to fail in ways that few had anticipated. The opacity created by complexity amplified uncertainty and panic, turning a sectoral problem into a systemic crisis. The organizational structure of financial institutions has similarly grown more complex. Global financial conglomerates now operate through hundreds or even thousands of legal entities spanning multiple jurisdictions. This structural complexity serves various purposes, including regulatory arbitrage and tax optimization, but it also makes these institutions extraordinarily difficult to manage, supervise, or resolve in case of failure. When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, it had nearly one million outstanding transactions across numerous subsidiaries, creating a legal and financial nightmare that exacerbated market panic and economic damage. Network complexity represents perhaps the most dangerous dimension of financial complexity. Financial institutions have become increasingly interconnected through counterparty relationships, creating channels for the rapid transmission of stress throughout the system. These connections mean that the failure of one institution can quickly threaten others, even those with no direct exposure to the original source of distress. The resulting contagion effects can transform isolated problems into system-wide crises, as demonstrated during the 2008 financial crisis when problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market ultimately threatened the entire global financial system. Complexity also undermines the effectiveness of both internal risk management and external regulation. Risk managers struggle to monitor and control risks they cannot fully comprehend, while regulators face similar challenges in overseeing increasingly complex institutions and markets. The result is a financial system that grows increasingly beyond the capacity of anyone to effectively govern or control. This governance challenge is compounded by the false sense of security that sophisticated risk management models can provide. These models, often based on historical data and simplifying assumptions, create an illusion of control that can lead to excessive risk-taking. Ironically, many measures intended to enhance financial stability have actually increased system complexity. Regulatory requirements, risk management practices, and financial innovations designed to distribute risk have added layers of complexity that may ultimately make the system more, rather than less, vulnerable to crisis. This dynamic creates a vicious cycle where problems lead to more complex regulations, which spawn more complex financial structures to circumvent those regulations, which in turn necessitate even more complex regulatory responses. Breaking this cycle requires recognizing that simplicity and transparency, rather than ever-increasing complexity, may be the true prerequisites for financial stability.

Chapter 4: The Agency Problem: Managing Other People's Money

The fundamental challenge at the heart of finance is the management of other people's money. This agency relationship creates inherent tensions and conflicts of interest that have grown more acute as the financial system has evolved away from traditional structures that helped align the interests of financial professionals with their clients. Understanding this agency problem is essential for diagnosing the dysfunctions of modern finance and identifying potential remedies. The separation of ownership and control in finance creates classic principal-agent problems. Savers and investors (principals) entrust their money to financial professionals (agents) who possess superior information and expertise. This information asymmetry creates opportunities for agents to act in ways that benefit themselves at the expense of their principals. While these agency problems exist in many industries, they are particularly severe in finance due to the complexity of financial products and the difficulty of monitoring financial professionals. Clients often cannot easily determine whether they are receiving good value or being exploited. Traditional financial institutions developed various mechanisms to mitigate these agency problems. Partnership structures in investment banks meant that partners had substantial personal capital at risk, aligning their interests with clients and encouraging prudent risk management. Similarly, mutual ownership structures in insurance companies and building societies eliminated conflicts between shareholders and customers. The erosion of these traditional structures has weakened these alignment mechanisms. When Goldman Sachs converted from a partnership to a public company in 1999, it fundamentally changed the incentives of its senior staff. Previously, partners had carefully monitored risk-taking because their personal wealth was at stake. Afterward, executives could pursue high-risk strategies knowing that shareholders would bear most losses while they captured much of the gains. The lengthening of intermediation chains has exacerbated agency problems. Where once savers might have dealt directly with the users of their capital through a single intermediary, modern financial chains often involve multiple layers of intermediation. Each link in this chain introduces additional agency relationships and opportunities for misalignment of interests. The result is a system where the ultimate sources and users of capital are increasingly disconnected from each other, with intermediaries extracting value at each step without necessarily adding corresponding value. Compensation structures throughout the financial sector often create perverse incentives that reward short-term performance at the expense of long-term client outcomes. Bonus systems tied to annual or quarterly results encourage excessive risk-taking and short-termism. The asymmetric nature of many compensation arrangements—where managers share in gains but not losses—further distorts incentives. Traders are rewarded for "tailgating" strategies that generate small, regular profits punctuated by occasional catastrophic losses. Since bonuses are paid annually but disasters might occur only every decade or so, the rational strategy is to maximize short-term gains and ignore long-tail risks. The cultural shift from stewardship to trading has fundamentally altered how financial professionals view their responsibilities. Where once bankers and fund managers saw themselves as custodians of their clients' wealth with long-term responsibilities, many now view themselves primarily as traders seeking to maximize short-term profits. This cultural transformation has undermined the ethical foundations necessary for the effective management of other people's money. The concept of fiduciary duty—acting solely in the client's best interest—has been eroded in favor of a transactional approach where conflicts of interest are normalized rather than minimized.

Chapter 5: Regulatory Failure and Misaligned Incentives

The regulatory framework governing finance has failed to keep pace with the transformation of the financial system, creating a mismatch between regulatory approaches and the realities of modern finance. This regulatory failure stems from both conceptual shortcomings and practical limitations in implementation, allowing financial institutions to pursue activities that generate private profits while creating systemic risks borne by society at large. Regulatory philosophy has been dominated by a belief that disclosure and transparency are sufficient to ensure market discipline. This approach assumes that if market participants have adequate information, they will make rational decisions that promote both their own interests and overall financial stability. However, this assumption ignores the complexity of modern finance, which makes it virtually impossible for even sophisticated investors to fully understand the risks they face. It also overlooks the behavioral biases that affect decision-making and the collective action problems that undermine market discipline. When risks are systemic rather than idiosyncratic, individual market participants have limited ability to protect themselves regardless of the information available. The capture of regulatory agencies by the industries they oversee represents another fundamental failure. Financial regulators often come from the industry they regulate and frequently return to it after their regulatory service, creating conflicts of interest and a revolving door that undermines independent oversight. Moreover, the resources and political influence of the financial industry far outweigh those of consumer advocates or other public interest groups, creating an imbalance in regulatory input that typically favors industry interests. This dynamic helps explain why regulations often address technical details while leaving fundamental structural problems untouched. Regulatory arbitrage has become a central feature of the financial landscape. Financial institutions devote substantial resources to structuring activities in ways that minimize regulatory constraints while preserving the economic substance of restricted activities. This cat-and-mouse game between regulators and regulated entities leads to increasingly complex regulations that are both costly to implement and ineffective at achieving their intended purposes. Credit default swaps, for instance, originated partly as a means to exploit differences between bank and insurance regulation. The Eurodollar market developed to circumvent interest rate restrictions. Each innovation triggers regulatory responses that financial institutions then work to circumvent, creating a cycle of increasing complexity without addressing fundamental problems. International regulatory competition further undermines effective oversight. The global nature of finance allows institutions to exploit differences in regulatory regimes across jurisdictions, creating a "race to the bottom" as countries compete to attract financial activity. Attempts at international coordination, such as the Basel Accords for banking regulation, have often produced complex compromises that fail to address fundamental issues. The resulting regulatory framework combines the worst aspects of national approaches—complexity without effectiveness, bureaucracy without accountability. The focus on microprudential regulation—oversight of individual institutions—has come at the expense of macroprudential approaches that address systemic risks. Regulators have traditionally focused on ensuring the safety and soundness of individual banks or other financial institutions, without adequately considering how their collective behavior might create systemic vulnerabilities. This regulatory myopia contributed significantly to the buildup of systemic risks before the financial crisis. Even when individual institutions appeared well-capitalized according to regulatory standards, the system as a whole had become dangerously leveraged and interconnected. Perhaps most fundamentally, regulation has failed to address the misaligned incentives that drive excessive risk-taking and short-termism throughout the financial system. By focusing on technical rules rather than structural reforms that would better align the interests of financial professionals with their clients and the broader economy, regulation has treated symptoms rather than underlying causes. Until these incentive problems are addressed through more fundamental structural changes, regulatory efforts will continue to chase financial innovation without effectively constraining its destabilizing effects.

Chapter 6: How Finance Neglects Real Economic Needs

The growing disconnect between the financial sector and the real economy represents one of the most troubling aspects of excessive financialization. Financial institutions have increasingly neglected their core functions of serving households and businesses in favor of more profitable trading activities and complex financial engineering. This neglect manifests in multiple ways, from the misallocation of capital to the failure to provide essential financial services to significant portions of the population. The allocation of capital to productive investments represents one of finance's most essential functions. However, modern financial markets increasingly direct capital toward speculative activities rather than productive enterprises. Initial public offerings (IPOs) and secondary market trading, once mechanisms for channeling savings to growing businesses, now primarily serve to provide liquidity for early investors and founders. Meanwhile, many productive small and medium enterprises struggle to access the capital they need to grow. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the "big four" banks control over 80% of SME lending, yet repeatedly fail to meet businesses' needs. Countries with more diverse banking systems, like Germany with its local savings banks and cooperative banks, have generally maintained stronger manufacturing bases and more balanced economies. Housing finance illustrates the distortion of financial priorities. Mortgage lending, traditionally a straightforward activity connecting savers to homebuyers, was transformed through securitization into a complex chain of transactions that prioritized fee generation and trading opportunities over prudent lending. The resulting explosion in subprime mortgages and related securities created short-term profits for financial institutions while ultimately devastating many communities and homeowners. The housing finance system wasn't broken, but financiers "fixed" it until it broke, replacing institutions with deep local knowledge like building societies and thrifts with transaction-oriented mortgage originators incentivized to maximize volume regardless of quality. Infrastructure investment has similarly suffered from financialization. Despite the critical importance of roads, bridges, power systems, and telecommunications networks, investment in infrastructure has declined in most developed economies. Public-private partnerships often prioritized complex financial engineering over actual engineering, creating arrangements that generated substantial fees for advisers while delivering questionable value for taxpayers. The UK's Private Finance Initiative exemplifies this problem, creating projects that ultimately cost far more than traditional public procurement while generating substantial profits for financial intermediaries. The payment system, perhaps the most fundamental financial service, has seen relatively little innovation benefiting end users despite enormous technological advances. While high-frequency trading operates on millisecond timescales, cross-border payments for ordinary customers remain slow, expensive, and cumbersome. This disparity reflects the financial sector's prioritization of profitable trading over basic services. The resources devoted to shaving microseconds off trading times could have been directed toward creating more efficient payment systems that would benefit millions of households and businesses. Perhaps most concerning is how financialization has affected ordinary households' financial security. The risks that matter most to ordinary people—job security, retirement savings, housing stability, protection against illness or disability—have been poorly addressed by financial innovation. Instead, households have been offered increasingly complex products with high fees and hidden risks. The shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension schemes has transferred investment risk from employers to employees, many of whom lack the expertise to manage these risks effectively. Meanwhile, basic financial services remain inaccessible or excessively expensive for significant portions of the population, particularly those with lower incomes. The neglect of real economy needs is particularly evident in the allocation of human capital. The financial sector has attracted many of the brightest graduates who might otherwise have pursued careers in science, medicine, engineering, or entrepreneurship. This diversion of talent represents a significant opportunity cost for society, especially when these individuals are employed in zero-sum trading activities rather than wealth-creating enterprises. As James Tobin observed, "We are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services."

Chapter 7: Reforming Finance: Restoring Purpose and Simplicity

Meaningful reform of the financial system must address its fundamental structural problems rather than simply adding more detailed regulations. The regulatory approach that has dominated since the global financial crisis—thousands of pages of new rules and requirements—has increased compliance costs without changing the underlying dynamics that make the system unstable and inefficient. A different approach is needed, one that restores finance to its proper role as servant rather than master of the real economy. The first principle of reform should be to separate utility banking from speculative trading. The core functions of payments, deposit-taking, and lending to households and businesses are essential public services that require protection. These activities should be separated from proprietary trading, complex securitization, and other speculative activities. This separation could take various forms—from full structural separation (a modern Glass-Steagall) to ring-fencing (as proposed by the UK's Independent Commission on Banking)—but the principle is clear: public guarantees should not subsidize private risk-taking. Institutions that benefit from deposit insurance and access to central bank liquidity should face corresponding limitations on their activities. Second, financial institutions should be structured to align the interests of decision-makers with the long-term consequences of their decisions. The partnership model, where senior managers had unlimited liability for losses, created strong incentives for prudent risk management. While a return to unlimited liability may not be practical, other mechanisms could achieve similar alignment. Extended liability for executives, deferred compensation that can be clawed back in the event of failure, and personal responsibility for misconduct would all help reduce excessive risk-taking. Compensation throughout the financial sector should be tied to genuine long-term performance, with substantial portions deferred for periods matching the time horizon of risks taken. Third, the financial system needs greater diversity in institutional forms and business models. The dominance of shareholder-owned, profit-maximizing corporations has crowded out alternative structures like mutuals, cooperatives, and public banks that may better serve certain market segments. Germany's three-pillar banking system—private banks, public savings banks, and cooperative banks—has proven more stable and effective at serving the real economy than the concentrated banking systems of the UK and US. Encouraging institutional diversity would make the system more resilient and responsive to diverse needs. Fourth, capital requirements should be substantially increased and simplified. The complex risk-weighting approach of Basel regulations has proven ineffective and easily gamed. A simple leverage ratio requiring banks to maintain equity capital of 15-20% of assets would provide a much stronger buffer against losses while reducing incentives for regulatory arbitrage. Higher capital requirements would make banking less profitable but more stable, forcing institutions to focus on creating genuine economic value rather than extracting subsidies through excessive leverage and implicit government guarantees. Fifth, shortening intermediation chains would reconnect savers and investors with the ultimate users of their capital. The proliferation of intermediaries in modern finance has increased costs, reduced transparency, and diluted accountability. More direct connections between sources and users of capital would not only reduce costs but also restore the information flows and relationships necessary for effective capital allocation and stewardship. This might involve breaking up financial conglomerates into smaller, more focused institutions that have clear purposes and accountability. Finally, technological innovation offers opportunities to bypass traditional financial intermediaries and create more direct, efficient connections between savers and users of capital. Peer-to-peer lending platforms, crowdfunding, and other financial technologies can potentially reduce costs and increase access to finance, particularly for individuals and small businesses historically underserved by conventional financial institutions. However, technological innovation must be guided by the principle of serving real economic needs rather than simply creating new opportunities for speculation or regulatory arbitrage. The ultimate goal should be a financial system that serves society rather than extracting value from it—one that directs capital to productive uses, provides essential services efficiently, and manages risk prudently. Finance should be boring again, focused on the unglamorous but vital work of supporting the real economy rather than the self-referential world of trading. As Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, observed: "Of all the many ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today."

Summary

The financialization of modern economies represents one of the most significant yet least understood transformations of recent decades. What began as a system to facilitate payments, direct savings toward productive investment, allocate capital efficiently, and help households manage financial security has evolved into a self-referential industry primarily engaged in trading with itself. This transformation has imposed enormous costs on society while making the financial system increasingly unstable and disconnected from the real economy it should serve. The central insight that emerges from examining this transformation is that finance exists to serve the real economy, not as an end in itself. When this purpose is forgotten or subverted, finance becomes not just inefficient but actively harmful to economic prosperity and social welfare. The path forward requires recognizing that finance is not, as some economists have suggested, a mathematical puzzle to be solved through ever more complex models and instruments. Rather, it is a social institution whose purpose is to serve households and businesses by connecting savers with productive investment opportunities and helping people manage financial risks across their lifetimes. Reforming finance means simplifying its structures, shortening intermediation chains, aligning incentives with social purpose, and restoring a culture of responsibility and service. Only through such fundamental changes can we create a financial system that truly serves society rather than extracting value from it. This transformation will require not just technical adjustments but a profound rethinking of what finance is for and how it should operate in a democratic society committed to broad-based prosperity.

About Author

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John Kay

I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1948, and completed my schooling and undergraduate education in that city: I am fortunate to have lived most of my life in beautiful places. I went to the University of Edinburgh to study mathematics. But, after taking a subsidiary course in economics, I decided that I wanted to be an economist. The notion that one might understand society better through the application of rigorous and logical analysis excited me – and it still does. After graduating from Edinburgh, I went to Nuffield College, Oxford. I worked there under James Mirrlees, who was in due course to win the Nobel Prize for his contributions to economic theory.On Mirrlees’s advice, I applied for and to my astonishment got a permanent teaching post in the University of Oxford at the embarrassingly early age of 21. Oxford is a collegiate university – members of the faculty generally have both University and College appointments. This post carried with it a fellowship at St John’s College, an association which I have maintained and enjoyed ever since. Through the 1970s I developed a conventional academic career, publishing in academic journals, and writing my first book Concentration in Modern Industry (with Leslie Hannah, an economic historian colleague). My particular interests were in public finance and industrial organisation.But my rationale for studying economics had, from the beginning, been concerned for application. My career began to change direction when I was asked to join a group to review the structure of the British tax system. This group was established under the auspices of a newly established think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and was headed by James Meade, another economist who had achieved the ultimate distinction of a Nobel prize. Meade’s rigour was as demanding as that of Mirrlees, (both delivered it with extraordinary personal charm). But the most important effect of my experience with the Meade Committee was that I began to develop a taste for the popular exposition of economic concepts.In this vein, I wrote (with Mervyn King, now Governor of the Bank of England) a more personal account of issues in taxation, The British Tax System which ran through five editions.Pursuing these interests, I moved from Oxford and joined the Institute for Fiscal Studies as its first research director. Soon after I became Director of the Institute. IFS developed into (and remains) one of Britain’s leading think tanks, respected and feared by policymakers and journalists for its fiercely independent analysis of fiscal issues.After seven years, I decided it was time to move on. The success of IFS had been built on serious economics accompanied by a commitment to popularisation and application. If this could be done for public policy issues, could the same be done in the area of business policy? This was the thinking that led me to accept a chair at the London Business School in 1986 and, at the same time, to establish a consulting company, London Economics.Over the next few years, the application of economics to business issues became my intellectual focus. During this period, London Economics grew rapidly, largely on the back of the wave of privatisation and regulatory change in Britain in the 1980s. By 1991, managing the company had become a major responsibility. I revised my arrangements with London Business School. My new contract was as Visiting Professor but my job as executive chairman of London Economics took the larger part of my time. London Economics grew until, by its tenth anniversary, its annual turnover exceeded £10m with offices in three continents and assignments in over sixty countries.London Economics gave me insights into the business world. These came both through consultancy work with major corporations and first hand observation of the growth and development of a small business. Other activities have enriched my more scholarly work by broadening the experi

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