The financial services industry is unique, writes Tim Price - no other industry in the world compensates its employees so generously while delivering such modest tangible value to its customers or society at large.
Despite the best creative efforts of tens of thousands of extremely well-paid financiers, the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker famously suggested that the most important financial innovation of the past 20 years was the ATM machine. Ever since the markets blew up in 2008, many investment practitioners have been engaged in something akin to a whodunit. Just how did we get into this mess? I suggest an answer - everybody did it. We all played a part. As Lord Overstone remarked, no warning can save people determined to grow suddenly rich. In the run-up to the global financi...
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