That’s the City type who used to write for The Guardian, Crooked Timber, Dan Davies. Not someone I like nor agree with – I have more than just a suspicion that the feeling is entirely mutual – but there has always been an enviable verve to his writing. Sure, some of the stylistic tricks* can become overdone but there’s none of us not guilty of that.
There there’s this extract from his book.
All that life and joy seems to have gone from the style. Might be the way The Guardian has extracted, might be the editor ironing it out for the book buying public. But a pity all the same.
*Footnotes**.
**Footnotes to footnotes***
*** As with Gibbon, that’s where all the jokes are****.
**** Or the dirty bits at least.*****
***** In Latin
And the article is odd. Not at all bad on what actually happened on LIBOR, but leaping wildly to it being a fraud. He says “What nobody seemed to realise is that an ongoing fraud was being committed. There was a conspiracy to tell a lie (to the Libor phone panel, about a bank’s true cost of funding) in order to induce someone to enter into a bargain at a disadvantage to themselves”, but he doesn’t name a victim or have any idea what was lost. Yes, there was a conspiracy to tell a lie, but the rest of it, not so much.
The whole point of LIBOR was that no-one in financial markets was able to trust government-set benchmarks because thay were shamelessly manipulated by politicians for the benefit of politicians. LIBOR was created in a way that no single bank could manipulate it (by excluding the outliers).
Dan Davies implies that Joe Public, you and I, were ripped off by conspiring fraudsters whereas the main, often the only losers, were the banks who lent much more money on a LIBOR+ basis than they borrowed. 99% of the victims were a part of Megabank A, ripped off by conspirators in Megabanks B and C in order to boost their bonuses.
All part of Grauniad’s pitch “Left-wing government good (because they give subsidies to the Grauniad by placing all public sector job adverts exclusively in The Guardian) – private sector bad”
NB you can manipulate the average by making sure that you bid low or high enough to make sure that you are the outlier
I watch from a distance on Twitter and there is a small coterie that makes high numbers of tweets everyday basically congratulating themselves on how much cleverer they are than anyone else but without showing many signs of it. Dan Davies is one of the bunch, along with that great SJW who used to comment here, John Band. They amuse and exasperate but they really hate being called out on their lazy generalisations.
This Guardian story is a classic case of lazy generalisations served up as fact rather than flimsily supported assertions. I strongly suspect that DD has never had any dealings whatsoever with an audit partner, let alone an audit committee. He just likes to give the impression that he is in the know.
Davies is actually a decent money maker in the City. Not saying he knows everything but he knows a lot.
Given the amount of time he must spend on Twitter, how much time does he have left for normal work?
john 77 said:
“All part of Grauniad’s pitch “Left-wing government good (because they give subsidies to the Grauniad by placing all public sector job adverts exclusively in The Guardian) – private sector bad””
Do they still do that? What happened to the plan to scrap Guardian advertising and have a single public sector jobs website with everything on it? Another failed Tory promise?
Did Dan Davies used to comment here occasionally, as “dsquared”? I know he used to show up on a lot of the same forums as John Band, who could be an interesting commenter here, particularly on industries he’d actually done consulting for.
Dd was indeed dsquared. How droll
@ RichardT
Once Labour lost power the Coalition instituted a new policy that government jobs would be advertised on the internet. There is no guarantee that Corbyn will not reverse that if he gains power.
I have been given the impression that a lot of Labour-controlled local councils still use The Guardian.
You may classify Theresa May as “left-wing” but the Grauniad do not.
@Diogenes
I used to think it was a pun on the Mahalanobis D-squared statistic…
I gave up reading Crooked Timber because so much of the writing was really poor.
You were fooled, MBE
both DD and John Band used to write very earnest pieces as if they had actually done the research whereas they had just cribbed Wiki. Perhaps I was one of the people who who got them to strut their pisspoor stuff on twitter instead.