Having heard two tremendously amusing interviews with John Lanchester (I think one was on Bloomberg and one on the BBC, tho maybe it was ABC and somebody else; in any case there seem to be lots of interviews with him floating around.) I was looking forward to reading his new How to Speak Money. I’ve long agreed with his basic point, that people talking about financial issues use a shorthand which can confuse civilians, and it would be helpful to have a glossary handy. What he has written gets part of the way there.
The first part of the book is an introductory, making the important point that economics isn’t a science, really can’t be in the way that physical or biological sciences are. For one thing, chemists don’t have to worry that the molecules they’re studying will read the results of prior research and decide that behaving differently would be to their advantage. He also notes that most of the main questions of economics remain open, but at least if we are going to discuss them we need to understand what we’re talking about. He brings up the concept of “reversification,” whereby things come to mean the opposite of the word used to describe them.”Securitization” doesn’t mean making things more secure, but more likely less so. The “Chinese wall,” which is supposed to divide functions within financial firms to prevent conflicts of interest, is in fact neither a physical wall nor an impenetrable barrier. And it’s reversification when the “credit” is defined as the amount of debt. Continue reading Words, including a new one, about money