This episode of the LRB podcast is part of our ongoing occasional collaboration with Talking Politics,

a weekly podcast with David Rundsman. You can find Talking Politics in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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

This is a joint episode that we're doing with the London Review of 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, big, 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.

And it's the thing Michael Lewis said somewhere that, you know, 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 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 very freely, but banks narrowly defined have really clamped up. But they were talking to you after 2008, when you'd think that they might feel a little anxious. Was it kind of therapy they needed someone to hear their side of the story? Partly, I think they were interested in the kind of technicalities of how it had happened.

I think that a lot of bankers also felt that, you know, consumer borrowing had gone out of control

and that was one of the triggers.

So the kind of lines of blame, you know, as well we were to blame too.

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