Finance: an introduction to the basics

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The litmus test of a financial adviser is their ability to distil the most complex financial instruments into terms even an idiot could understand. Whereas the litmus test of those whose job it is to sell financial instruments is their ability to make the simplest thing in the world seem more arcane than anything postulated into existence by Heidegger, say. This is the most pernicious conflict of interest in an industry notoriously riven with them. And be warned: just because something sounds simple does not mean it is. (The words my father might have spoken to me in a more reflective moment, if he hadn’t fucked off when I was six months’ old.)

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The time value of money is a concept I struggled to comprehend at one point, now I am literally unable to think about the future without discounting it. In other words, I am stuck in a world where the future always has a chunk subtracted.

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Financial engineering at its best is audacious and fiendishly complicated. That is why, precisely why, so many great minds are dedicated to this darkest of dark arts. Some will say that this equates to a scandalous squandering of so-called talent. Others the precise opposite. The former are normally poor, the latter rich.

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Markets deprive our most fiercely idiosyncratic ideologies of the power to divide us into irreconcilable tribes.