‘Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World’ by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

One of the elements of modern finance that I think is least appreciated is the sheer amount of financial churn (i.e. money changing hands) that has to occur to generate the value (and compensated) expected in that sector.

Often, retail customers see taglines like ‘planning your retirement’ or ‘securing your future’, so it can seem like there is a certain amount of slowness is inherent in the way money moves.

However, modern finance is a rapid, global game of seeking out new investment opportunities. Compensation to most financiers is paid based on deal flow (i.e. how many deals did you do? how much money passed through your hands?)

The sheer speed of this game, it has many elements that make it a game (competition, teams, league tables etc.), means that no human on earth can keep up with all of the elements. And when the markets are hot and the word is that some other financiers are making big deals, people can stop asking questions and just push money at anything.

So the book ‘Billion Dollar Whale’ is a book about the largest fraud that may have ever been committed. It may result in a long term depression of the growth of Malaysia. It portrays global finance as a shell game where people hide money across the globe, take payouts and embezzle. It links the finance with the debauchery that we all think happens (clubs, models in bikinis, yachts etc.). It is the real ‘wolf of wall street’.

But I took something darker from it. What it made me feel is sad and afraid. It made me feel that finance, where I spent some time, is this incredible, furiously spinning wheel, manned by people whose only mission is to speed the wheel up and up. They don’t what they have to do to speed it up, only that it speeds up. Spinning and spinning. What catastrophes come from an a wheel spinning ever faster?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

-W. B Yeats