Banking & Beyond: The Book

My new project

Against my better judgement, I have been persuaded to write a book about finance for university students, young professionals and others working in or outside the financial services industry. If this sounds familiar, it should. This is after all what I have doing for several years now with my current events posts in this newsletter, Banking & Beyond.

My new book will not be simply a compilation of my old newsletter posts, although there will likely be a fair amount of overlap in content between the two. In the book, I plan to select a variety of interesting stories—for example the fictional bank run scene from the film It’s a Wonderful Life and the very real-world failure of Silicon Valley Bank—and use these stories as a framework with which to explore the workings of financial institutions and markets, expressed in plain English and with a minimum of academic theory and no mathematics. The book will contain a high-level explanation of finance targeted to non-finance professionals, which I hope may also be of some interest to finance students and those working in or around the financial services industry.

This will not be a book designed to be read from start to finish, but will instead be structured in a way that makes it easy to dip into and out of, like a book of essays (which I guess it will be). My hope is that readers will find the material not only interesting and informative, but entertaining as well. Life is too short to be taken seriously all the time, and the financial world is no different, even if finance people sometimes lose sight of this fact.

My plan is to publish draft chapters from the new book in my Banking & Beyond newsletter, in the hope that my newsletter readers may not only find some of this material interesting but will also provide me with constructive commentary which I can incorporate into the final version of the book.

I have no commercial ambitions for this project and I am not at all confident that this material will ever make its way from my newsletter drafts into a published book, printed with old-school paper and ink. And I certainly do not expect that this book will make its way onto Amazon or the New York Times best seller list. But I am going to give this a shot anyway, in the hopes that someone someday may decide to publish it, most likely against their own better judgment.

In the meantime, I intend to continue writing about current events in my Banking & Beyond newsletter, as I did with this week’s post on The Inflation Question. I hope you all will continue reading and commenting on these posts, whether or not you choose to follow and participate in the creation of my new book.

In closing, let me take this opportunity once again to thank you all for reading my Banking & Beyond posts over the past few years. I spend a fair amount of time writing some of these posts, as my wife will attest, and I hope that you have found at least some of them worthwhile. As you might expect, I do not have many followers on Substack—by my estimate roughly 192 million fewer followers than Elon Musk has on X—but I know that many of you spend more time reading just one of my posts than you do on a week’s worth of commentary from Elon.

And in a world which is not always fair, this seems just about right.

To me at least.