"Cityboy" by Geraint Anderson

Perhaps a memoir, perhaps a roman a clef, Cityboy recounts the progress of a young man who started working for a bank in the City of London in 1996, became arrogant, hedonistic and wealthy, fuelling his success with a cocaine addiction and enormous amounts of alcohol, while understanding that he was nothing more than a gambler in a casino whose stake was supplied by others. It is a classic Faustian tale (it starts: “Everybody sells their soul to the devil ... I just decided that I'd get a damn good price for mine.” C 1) except that the narrator manages to escape the hell into which he has fallen. 

He is scathing about his (now former) profession. He and his colleagues lie and cheat and break almost all of the rules; he suggests that it is the system which both allows and encourages arrogance and recklessness and the easing of regulations has led directly to the market crashes. He concludes:

• “Money as the one true God and the Gospel according to Adam Smith became the only one that anyone now listens to.” (C 5)
• “Capitalist economies can only survive if they grow and that requires people to be dissatisfied because only people desperate for material betterment will buy that flashier car or that smarter jacket ... The trick is to make people as unhappy about themselves as possible so that they strive to spend the cash in the false hope that it will make me happy and sexy.” (C 5)
• “Our masters have successfully employed clever propaganda to feed our pathetic obsession with celebrities and so distract us from unjustifiable wars and hideous unfairness of our socio-economic system.” (C 5)
• “We live in a superficial bling bling society that is neither happy nor peaceful.” (C 5)

Yet, throughout, even while describing in remorseless detail his drug habit, his exploitation of friends and women, and his appalling lack of any sort of professional standards, one still roots for him. He is a lad and his misdemeanours are told to the accompaniment of laddish (sometimes nakedly sexist, if one is allowed that adverb in that context) laddish banter:

• “Stress will kill you quicker than a rabbit gets fucked.” (C 1)
• “To say I made a tit of myself would be to insult mammary glands across this planet.” (C 1)
• “Body from Baywatch but face from Crimewatch.” (C 2)
• “The chances of that happening are somewhere between slim and none, and as far as I can see slim left town a long time ago.” (C 2)
• “I didn't just look (and feel) like the living dead; I looked like the dead dead.” (C 3)

These are a very few samples from an enormous potential selection. There are many times when 'laddish' becomes uncomfortably misogynist. And yet ... he portrays himself as flawed but better than others; most importantly, he is the one who analyses the game he is playing as fundamentally destructive to the players and to the economy and the hard-earned pennies of the people who allow these greedy fools to play with their money. Perhaps his epiphany comes when he visits a prison in Bolivia: “In San Pedro money could literally buy you anything, but a lack of it meant you had nowhere to sleep and that you could lose your life at the drop of a hat. It was an existence entirely dictated by unmitigated market forces. There was no welfare state or NHS diluting true ‘dog eat dog’ capitalism here. It was the ultimate untainted capitalist state where the law of the jungle ruled ... and it was horrific. They were four murders a month and anyone without cash lived in a state of constant fear. ... It seemed to me that the elites of Western societies had cleverly ensured that the states we live in had the bare minimum of support mechanisms in place. They had done this so that capitalism would thrive, ensuring that their privileged life continued, but it was also not so unremittingly harsh that an underclass existed with so little hope that they would attempt mass insurrection.” (C 6)

Other great moments:

• “I was talking about some really important stuff like how great I was and he was refusing to participate in this extremely interesting discussion. In fact, he was banging on about some fairly pointless subject - something about how fabulous he was or some such nonsense.” (C 5) The self-obsession of those who have been snorting cocaine
• “They say you make your own luck but sometimes you ain't got nothing to do with it.” (C 6)
• “Watching corpulent buffoons wearing appalling sports jackets actually believing that the fit young totty they’re chatting to at dreadful clubs in Soho with interested in anything other than their wedge would be humorous were is not so tragic.” (C 1)
• “In the country of the blind drunk, the one-eyed trouser snake is king.” (C 7)

January 2020; 419 pages

"Romanoff Gold: The lost fortunes of the Tsars" by William Clarke

When Tsar Nicholas I abdicated in 1917, the vast majority of the wealth of this fabulously rich absolute monarch became the property of the Russian state. After the Bolshevik coup of that year, when he, his wife and his children were sent to Siberia, they didn't have enough cash to live on although his wife and daughters still had jewels sewn into their underclothes. The assassination of the entire family at Ekaterinburg meant that other members of the extended Romanov family (at least those who were safe having fled abroad) believed they were entitled to the lost Romanov millions. Add to this the various frauds and imposters who claimed that they were members of the family who had escaped the Ekaterinburg massacre and who were attracted by the thought of the lost gold and diamonds and the chaos of the Red-White Russian Civil War immediately following the revolution during which trainloads of gold bullion with a variety of provenances seemed to wander around Siberia paying off guerillas, bandits, warlords and irregular troops, and you have a recipe for convoluted and protracted court cases.

Clarke has spent years trying to get to the bottom of who owned what and where it is now. What happened to the jewels and gold in Russia? Did the Romanovs have fortunes in gold deposits and bonds in foreign banks stashed away as a nest egg in case of revolution? And how can you separate an absolute monarch's private wealth from the wealth of the state?

This is a labyrinth which this book does little to clear up. The same sums are repeated many times, the same arguments made, so that one becomes confused or wonders whether there is not a significant amount of padding going on (a suspicion reinforced when the author starts by rather needlessly going over waht happened to the Tsar's family, most of which is well known and little of which had direct bearing on his argument). And in the end the answers seems to be a repeated no. There are no mysterious foreign deposits (and what there are are state funds that basically became a pay-off when the Bolsheviks reneged on Russian war loans). Various people accused of siphoning off Romanov wealth from an emigre banker to George V's wife were probably honest and decent people doing their best for the poor exiled Romanovs. The imposters were imposters. It's a bit of an anti-climax in the end.

What does distinguish this book (which is the 2007 Sutton Publishing edition published in Stroud, Gloucestershire) is the remarkably dreadful quality of its typesetting. Mistypings abound: Plish for Polish, 19398 for 1939 (or 1938?). Given the detailed and convoluted nature of the arguments with so many sums of money (often written in roubles, or roules on one occasion but also on guineas, pounds, dollars, Canadian dollars, and reichsmarks) even one or two misprints undermine one's confidence in the entire argument.

A very disappointing book. April 2015; 419 pages

A much better telling of the story of the Romanovs, albeit published before the DNA evidence established the truth of the Ekaterinburg massacre, is The File on the Tsar by Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold or, for a brilliant historical comparison of Nicholas II, George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II, try Three Emperors by Miranda Carter.

"The Ascent of Money" by Niall Ferguson

This book is subtitled A Financial History of the World and tells the story of finance from Mesopotamian days to the 2007 credit crunch. It accompanies a Channel Four TV series, traces of which can be seen in the prose (there are frequent references to places which are clearly camera shots: the East End of Glasgow, Memphis, and Stowe House for example).

It is not organised as history but in themes (presumably the programmes). Thus: one chapter considers government bonds, one traces the history of shares, one considers insurance and one property. There is a considerable emphasis on the recent turmoil on the financial markets; as a history it has a definite bias to the more recent. There are many interesting moments; I was, for example, charmed by the anti-capitalist antecedents of Monopoly. But there are also occasions when I wanted to know more, more, more: he mentions the Dutch Tulip bubble and the South Sea bubble both of which I know something about but I wanted more; he tantalisingly mentions (twice) the collapse of Overend Gurney but he never tells us what happened. Not only this but I was left floundering by his explanations of what a hedge fund is; and of put,call and swap options.

All in all this was an interesting book but not a fascinating one and it left me frustrated with a lot of unanswered questions.

July 2009, 362 pages