Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics.

I'm delighted that we're joined by John Lentister and we've also got Helen Thompson here.

This is a joint episode that we're doing with the London Rio Books. We do a few of these.

It's great to have John here because John has written in the LRB about pretty much all the

things that we're interested in on this podcast, money and technology and politics and power.

We're going to touch base with a few things that John has written over the past few years

actually in the LRB and we'll post links to those pieces if people want to read up on them

afterwards. We're going to start by talking about banks because one of the things that

John does is he translates from the world of the bankers to the world of the rest of us,

what some of them are actually thinking. This week there's been another, I don't know,

we'll ask John a second, maybe not so big scandal involving LIBOR and the possibility

that the Bank of England was implicated in the LIBOR fixing and John wrote about that a

few years ago. But a broader question to start with, how are the bankers feeling post-Brexit

post-Trump about a world in which politics has, I imagine, for some of them gone mad?

Do they feel implicated?

I doubt it. I mean, I should start by saying bankers in the strict sense, I don't know

very many of them anymore because they stopped talking to me.

As the thing Michael Lewis said somewhere that if the banks think they have nothing to hide,

they certainly don't behave like it. And one of the things that's happened is that all

the channels of communication that are around in kind of 2010 have sealed up and people

are incredibly close-mouthed if you're not an insider. They won't talk. There doesn't

go for the whole of finance, by the way. There are lots of people in other areas who talk

...