Media Spotlight: Good Value by Stephen Green
Share
It’s rare for the seemingly conflicting worlds of finance and religion to overlap. After all, when business was booming there was no need to appeal to a higher power as the drive for money was all the industry needed to get by.
It’s only when the world started crashing down around us that people started to wonder whether praying might offer a way out of the mess.
Bank of England governor Mervyn King - who probably considers himself to be something of a City deity anyway - drew on religion earlier this year in his oft-quoted Mansion House speech.
In this King lamented the Bank’s lack of power to effect change in ensuring financial stability, saying the central bank is limited to “issuing sermons and organising burials”.
And as economists and commentators continue to unpick what went wrong and how to avoid another crisis the recurring theme is that of values, or the apparent lack of them.
That’s where Stephen Green comes in. As chairman of HSBC he will always have something to contribute to the debate on whether capitalism offers the best model for creating wealth while still giving back to society.
But Green brings a unique slant in that while he has been working with HSBC since 1982, he has also been an ordained priest in the Church of England since 1988.
His book, Good Value: Reflections On Money, Morality And An Uncertain World, explores whether capitalism is intrinsically unstable and what we can do about it. It poses the question - if everything has a price, what does that do to our sense of value?
To say Good Value covers a wide range of issues is like saying mortgages are a bit tricky to come by. From history to religion and fromeconomics to philosophy, Green’s breadth of knowledge is staggering.
From the first page he strikes the reader as one of those annoying Stephen Fry types who know everything about everything.
And perhaps even more annoyingly, on top of heading the ‘world’s local bank’ and overseeing a network of 8,500 offices in 86 countries he also happens to write well.
Green challenges readers by drawing on a wealth of economic research and personal experience while always returning to the elusive search for meaning.
While this may sound too touchy-feely for some, he manages to make his arguments without coming across as condescending or preachy. The book is peppered with interesting facts, such as that in 1990 just 10% of mortgages in the US were securitised but by 2007 this had swollen to more that 70%.
He also manages to break down economic theory succinctly and provides an insider’s view of global finance.
Green tells of how at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year Asian policymakers turned on their Western counterparts, damning capitalism as “nothing but overindulgence”.
Good Value is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to high level management while clueing the rest of us in on the issues involved in moulding a better financial services sector.
And before you argue that Green’s sermon is just profiteering you should know that he is donating all the proceeds from his book to charity. Good value indeed.
If you enjoyed this article, sign up here to receive daily email updates from Mortgage Strategy and Follow @mortgagestrat
