GUEST COMMENT: A hedge fund manager hits back
My name is John Veals. You may not have hard of me, but I used to run High Level Capital - an outfit which shot the lights out in the credit crisis. I'm going to use the space I've been allotted here to give you my take on what happened and why.
See, it wasn't just investment bankers who were dancing to the music.
Footballers, TV chefs, brain-dead celebrities, freeloading politicians, conceptual artists flogging traffic bollards, drunken berks on stag nights in Prague, middle-class plonkers installing heated swimming pools in their gardens, shop-girls hiring stretch limos for a Saturday night on the town, the smart-arse at the office who accumulated a couple of dozen buy-to-let apartments, your own dear wife who was so ecstatic at the rise in house prices that she took to doing her Christmas shopping in Manhattan. In other words, almost every bloody person in the entire bloody country - all hooked on funny money, all living the big lie.
As for scape-goating the financial industry, I don't agree. It's like blaming the pub for your hangover. That's not to deny that some of the barmen were idiots and some of them gave you the wrong change. But they didn't force the drink down your throat, did they? You were gulping it down as fast as you could. As were the barmen themselves, of course.
When it all went tits up, I made a stonking profit - how stonking I leave to your imagination - and now I've retired to Lucerne where I manage my own money without having to justify what I'm doing to whingeing clients and out-to-lunch regulators. I have a new wife, a beautiful baby daughter, and a lakeside villa designed by a well-known architect.
Do I miss living in London? You must be joking. I pass my days in peace and quiet, taking long walks in the mountains, even learning to ski, which is no picnic with my dodgy knees. I also have time to catch up on my reading, for the first time in years.
You think the UK should downsize financial services, get back to making things instead of just moving money around? Have you forgotten the nineteen-seventies?
Manufacturing didn't work out so well then, did it? And now the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the East Europeans, the Turks - in fact three quarters of the population of the entire planet are in the manufacturing game. You think we should compete with that lot? Are you having a giraffe? The UK downsizing financial services would be like the Saudis downsizing oil, or the Eskimos downsizing fishing.
For the time being, I'll just stay here in Switzerland, enjoying the food and scenery, playing with the baby and listening to my wife practising her music. Maybe at some point, I'll set pen to paper in a more organised way. After all, somebody has to set the record straight.
John Veals is the fictional villanous hedge fund manager from Sebastian Faulks' novel 'A Day in December. This is an extract from an 'interview' with John which appears in "The Gathering Storm," a book on, 'how to avoid the next crisis from the minds that predicted the credit crunch.' The Gathering Storm is edited by Lee Robinson and Patrick L Young and published by DV Books; all proceeds go to charity. You can buy it here.
