sutton038

A few weeks ago a group of wayward individuals met at Waterloo station. We hitched a ride on a train going north into the English wilderness. Bertrand was forward-thinking enough to have brought beers for the journey, a skill he learnt in his 10 years working for Deutsche Bank as a structured equity derivatives trader. Next to him was Ingo . Ingo does things that make my mind hurt, which involves channelling and managing innovation and systems design, in Sweden. Behind me was Neil . He works for the Young Foundation, helping to design things called Social Impact Bonds, ways of allowing private investors to get involved in financing early interventions that might reduce social malladies. He was chatting to David , who specialises in design, and in particular, new means of mapping and visualising the financial sector. Bertrand started talking about social CDOs , and that's when people on the train started to look at us funny. A girl sitting next to me asked me who we were. Um, how d...

In 2008 I embarked on an unusual experiment in gonzo urban anthropology. I left the world of radical left-wing academia, and went to London with two goals in mind. Goal one: To break into the financial sector at the heart of one of the most powerful centres of the global economy and to see first-hand how it worked, to learn by doing, not by reading. Goal two: To shatter the complacent intellectual comfort zone I’d found myself in, and to learn to move in and out of different worlds like a chameleon. It was an exercise in critical thought, backed by real action. ADVANCED TIE SKILLZ That’s how I found myself on the 36th floor of the Lehman Brothers offices in Canary Wharf, four weeks before the company collapsed, and how I found myself in the subsequent financial crisis, trying to pitch esoteric inflation derivatives, property derivatives, and longevity derivatives, aboard a mad raft with an oddball crew of old rogues and young rats, fighting against the odds to stay afloat. It’s a prett...