11th May:

According to the famous bible passage “the meek shall inherit the earth”. I reckon you need to worry less about the meek, though, and more about the accountants.

I was always crap at maths. But I never really worried about it because I never had any aspiration to be an engineer, a physicist or (god forbid) a maths teacher. The finer points of algebra and calculus remain as blissfully irrelevant to me now as the day I first studied them. I do worry about accountants though. Firstly, because it strikes me as being the dullest of professions and secondly because I believe that most accountants are closet megalomaniacs living with thinly disguised control-freakery issues.

Money makes the world go round. But are we its master or its slave? When the recent financial crisis was at its worst, the government rewarded several UK banks that were, to quote HM Treasury, “too big to fail”, by pumping many millions of Pounds of taxpayers money into them. They, in return, looked contrite for all of 5 minutes, mumbled something about a “global situation” and then sneaked off when nobody was looking to order another plate of oysters and bottle of Krug. And the current pressure on the Tories and LibDems to form a new government seems to be driven by an apparent need to reassure the money markets that everything is ok above anything else. Sorry, but who is serving who, here?

The spotty kid with too many Parker pens in his top blazer pocket may have graduated into the geeky, Volvo-driving adult who now heads up the finance department, but mock him at your peril. He may wear novelty ties/sock/cufflinks and require every excel spreadsheet to contain an outrageous numbers of tabs and interlinking formulae, but he also wears the sneaky, self-satisfied smirk of someone who knows he holds the purse strings and can finally get his own back. The kids that used to wait for him at lunchtime, stick chewing gum in his hair and throw his schoolbag up into the trees may have been more popular with the girls, but he’s the guy now calculating their redundancy payments. And loving every second of second if it...

Having only been very occasionally bullied at school for my big ears and quiet demeanour by the resident class psycho (every year had one - I assume he’s now either dead or in prison) I never felt the need to study finance. Probably no bad thing, however. Living in these interesting times, it does feel like a great many financial institutions refuse to accept that they are part of the problem and almost see themselves as being above and beyond the reach of our public and politicians. Which cannot be right. Liberal democracies require the flow of capital but they also require financial institutions to be regulated in order to prevent the abusive excesses and morally dubious activities the likes of which we now see Goldman Sachs being accused (activities that are probably far more prevalent than we’ll ever know).

So there you have it. Come the day of judgement, the meek may manage to get their hands on the keys to the earth. But I suspect it’s the finance geeks in the background who will still be calling the shots.