A Fool and His Money

The intention of this book is to entertain and explain the supposedly arcane areas of "high finance" with humour. It starts from the premise that there are only five things you can do with money: buy it, borrow it, lend or sell it, or if your have enough - sit on it. Martin Baker sees the market as a disparate group of highly-paid people with a common economic purpose and the collective intelligence of a trout. Financial markets need psychiatrists to show why and how the market moves and to explain the role of rumour and the irrelevance of statistics. He tells us what really happens in foreign exchange markets and why drugs and a German sports car are absolutely necessary to facilitate international currency exchange in which more than three times the annual gross national product of the USA changes hands every day in dealing rooms run by over-confident and under-educated young people. Stockbrokers' jargon is explained, as are banks, the explosion of credit cards and the colossal power without responsibility of fund managers.
Baker shows how the search for "ethical" investment is self-deluding nonsense and how the slave labour markets of South East Asia are the object of a mini-revival. Martin Baker's thesis is that financial markets are useful but crazy.