Warning - adult material

There's a passage I vaguely remembered from Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, which popped into my head whilst listening to reports of the global financial services industry going up in smoke. Bonfire's not one of my all-time favourite books (in fact it's not even my favourite Tom Wolfe - I enjoyed The Right Stuff far more), but it does have at least one brilliant moment.

That moment concerns the main character, Sherman McCoy and his relationship with his young daughter, Campbell. Sherman makes his unspeakably well-paid living doing fantastically intricate and, to most people, abstract things with bonds on Wall Street. Campbell tells her father in clearly awestruck terms that her friend MacKenzie's daddy makes books for a living and has eighty people working for him. She then asks Sherman what he does for a living. As a big beast on Wall Street, Sherman McCoy knows that what he does is more important than the activities of some small-time printer, but finds himself at a loss, floundering hopelessly as he tries to explain investment banking to a seven year old. Needless to say he can't find anything to say about what he does for a living which impresses her.

Sherman's wife, an interior designer gets involved in the discussion, not taking Sherman's profession as seriously as he thinks it deserves. A bit of a domestic ensues, with Sherman laying into his wife's job (she's an interior designer). Her reply to this attack contrasts the self-importance, insane complexity and sheer unreality of most of the "work" done on Wall Street or in the City with work done in the real world:

Well at least you're able to point to something you've done, something tangible, something clear-cut .... something real, something describable, something contributing to simple human satisfaction, no matter how meretricious or temporary, something you can at least explain to your children. I mean at Pierce and Pierce, what on earth do you tell each other you do every day?

It's a great The Emperor's New Clothes moment, where a child's directness cuts through the self-important adult bull. Perhaps there's something in the idea that any job you can't explain to a child isn't a proper job. People use the term "adult material" to describe porn, but I think that the description applies equally well to the world of high finance and financial services, too abstract and wilfully wrapped in layers of obscure and arcane complexity to engage the mind of a child. Come to think of it, if you published magazines for and about the whizz kid traders who, until recently, made fortunes out of all this tortuous financial complexity, you could call them Playboy, Hustler, Loaded or Nuts - the titles would be just as apt for money porn as they are for the top shelf market.

The abstraction, over complexity and lack of a direct, child-like perspective is, I think, important. The root of the whole crisis depended on people getting caught up in an almighty tangle of complex deals, which they still haven't been able to wholly unpick.