Summary
HIGH FINANCE: Laurie Taylor talks to Brett Christophers, Professor in the Department of Human Geography at Uppsala University, Sweden, whose latest book argues that banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis . Today, our new economic masters are asset managers who don’t just own financial assets, they also own the roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live—these all now swell asset managers’ bulging investment portfolios. They’re joined by Megan Tobias Neely, Assistant Professor in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School and author of a study which takes us behind the designer suits and helicopter commutes to provide a glimpse of the lives and times of the mainly white men who dominate the hedge fund industry where about 10,000 firms manage $4 trillion in assets and the average earnings are $1.4 mm a year - which can rise to several billion.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
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| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
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| 0:37.0 | This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC, and for more details and much much more about thinking |
| 0:43.8 | allowed go to our website at BBC.co. UK. |
| 0:48.5 | Hello my profound sense that capitalism was not on my side began at the age of 16 when I discovered |
| 0:56.6 | the Midland Bank had charged me interest on my modest overdraft. |
| 1:00.8 | Well with a flash of revolutionary zeal I demanded to see the bank manager in person. |
| 1:05.8 | Now in those days bank managers lived well away from mere counterstaff in their own |
| 1:10.5 | rather splendid carpeted room and I vividly remember telling my own |
| 1:14.8 | manager that such a policy was perverse. How might I ever pay back my overdraft |
| 1:20.2 | when he kept topping it up with interest. He lent back avunculary in his high back chair, |
| 1:27.0 | fixed me with a withering gaze before memorably asserting, |
| 1:31.0 | Mr Taylor, the Midland Bank is not a Robin Hood organization. |
| 1:37.0 | Now I suspect it was this early encounter with banking practices that lay behind my pleasure at reading in a new book that banks had been |
| 1:44.6 | forced to take a back seat in financial matters since the global financial crisis just |
| 1:50.0 | over 15 years ago. The new masters were explicitly named in the title of that book, Our Lives |
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