Pocket Banker [antikvár]

Preface My hope is that this book will instruct and entertain, not necessarily in that order. Banking and finance are subjects with their own dialect, a dialect that makes opaque the layman's view of quite simple subjects. Start by remembering that bankers are little more than sophisticated barrow boys, hawking loans and on the scrounge for other people's money (deposits). Banker-speak is one part of a centuries-old conspiracy to camouflage the basic nature of their business. But their dialect also sometimes betrays them. They talk a lot of markets. And it is helpful to think of the City of London (or of any other financial centre) as a number of different market places where different financial products are packaged and sold. As anywhere else, the market stall and the corner shop are being replaced by the supermarket and the boutique. Communicating with a bank should be no more daunting than walking into Safeways or telephoning a mail order company. The book is a combination of at least three things - a dictionary, an encyclopaedia, and a book of records. It is a bit of each and comprehensively none of them. A lot more space and energy would be required for it to be more. My reasons for the formula are no more advanced than that I believe it makes banking a bit more fun, and may help strip away some of the mystery for laymen and students from a subject that more and more hits the headlines from Manchester to Mexico. My thanks are due to many people for helping in the production of this book: to EHzabeth Bland, Penny Butler and Christopher Hutton-WilHams for tussHng with a less than perfect manuscript; to Patrick Frazer for pointing out some unpardonable errors; to my colleagues on The Economist, Robert Wilhs who compiled the statistical tables, Bobby Hunt who drew the cartoons and Kevin Kallaugher who drew the caricatures. Not least of all my thanks are due to my wife, ElHan, who cheerfully coped with a long series of solitary weekends whilst I scribbled my way from A to Z. Tim Hindle, September 1984