It's a movie not a book, and needless to say not a completely accurate representation of the world of global banking, but I recommend it as a very good thriller with a certain amount of intellectual interest and some wonderfully filmed sequences including a spectacular 15-minute shoot-out in The Guggenheim. The film treats all banks as criminal conspiracies run by psychopathic maniacs, and presents the system of organised criminality as invincible. I think the reality in a way may be scarier – that indeed we can't control the system, and it can do this to our livelihoods when run by rather ordinary people who have simply lost their moral anchor and an earlier and more prescriptive set of social norms.

For those who are interested, I discussed the movie on Radio 3's marvellous Nightwaves yesterday – the programme is available to listen again for a bit longer & will reappear in the archive later I think. Also on the programme was Romantic Economist Richard Bronk talking about his recent book and a theological discussion about abstinence which extended into whether a bust is a necessary purgative for the economy after a period of boom.

John Kay's latest book The Long and the Short of It has been very favourably reviewed (including by my BBC Trust colleague Jeremy Peat, in the forthcoming Business Economist). Although I've not yet read my copy, I spoke to John about it earlier this week.

He is, as most readers will know, an ornament to the economics profession, a constant ambassador for the power the analytical approach of economics in business and policy, and a clear and compelling writer including in his regular FT columns. John (pictured with a copy of the FT, below) told me this book is intended as a readable guide to finance and investment which finds the middle ground between the many inane 'how to' books which insult the intelligence, and the heavyweight texts such as Burton Malkiel. There are few other books aiming at this gap, especially for UK-based investors. He wrote the book in 2007 and into October 2008. It was published last month, so there have been some more dramatic events in the financial markets meanwhile, but the book does take account of the fact that the financial world has fallen apart.

The intended market consists of intelligent but non-specialist investors, and concerned citizens. For the former, the book's key message is that the least risky way to increase returns is to do more investing for yourself and not through intermediated products. This is cheap and practical online. The messages are: pay less in fees, diversify, and be contrarian. A summary I picked out: “Keep it simple. If you don't understand a financial product, don't buy it.”

For the concerned citizens, John's message is that less regulation is needed, rather than more, but of a structural kind. The utility of narrow banking must be separated from casino banking. The financial services conglomerates were unmanageable and uncontrollable. John told me he now favours nationalisation as the fastest and easiest way to achieve this.

All in all, it looks like a rewarding read. Soon I'll post about the rest of our conversation, which was about self-publishing.

Earlier this week I met Christine Hancock of the campaigning public health charity Oxford Health Alliance and we got to discussing the state of the economy, as one does these days. Her comment about the lack of realism in do-gooding middle class advice about saving money by shopping for healthy food reminded me of this passage from Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier:

The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and
tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less
than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and
nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on
tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the
materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four
or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is
white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes—an
appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on
wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like
the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate
their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary
human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being
would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the
peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined
you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy
breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man
doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last
chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when
you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat
dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three
pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the
kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind
works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and
sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at
least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold
water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly
palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of
tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a
crust of brown bread.

(The whole section is on the Orwell Prize website.)

My conversation with Christine was followed by an article in the FT today about soaring fast food sales as diners switch from The Ivy to KFC….

Scary how relevant Orwell is turning out to be. He's always been one of my favourite writers, not for political reasons per se but because of his marvellous and again highly relevant essay on Politics and the English Language. An excellent recent biography of Orwell was written by an old friend of mine, DJ Taylor – there is a taster here.

This one from Keynes: “It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to profess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men. It is so much their stock-in-trade that their position should not be
questioned, that they do not even question it themselves until it is
too late. Like the honest citizens they are, they feel a proper
indignation at the perils of the wicked world in which they live, —
when the perils mature; but they do not foresee them.” From Essays in Persuasion 1931

Reading Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal on the tube – yes, I know, two years late but he suffers from his audience thinking they've read everything in the New York Times column already – and found this terrific quotation from FDR's 1936 Madison Square Garden speech: “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

Anybody have other apt historical quotes to offer?

I plan to post more on the Krugman book when I've finished it. It's the least I can do for a writer who uses 'whom' and does so correctly eg p 57.

Also upcoming: comments on The Age of Wonder by Richard Homes, and an interview with John Kay about his new book The Long and Short of It.