A story about a banker and why it matters

It was 2008.  I worked for a bank.  That was something of a social conversation-killer back then. Who would be part of such a heinous profession?  Instead, I could  bluff and pretend that I worked in ‘communications’ or ‘change management’ or something equally vague and potentially less offensive. 

The popular image then of a banker was already not very attractive – associated with Gordon Gekko, in Wall Street, proclaiming ‘greed is good’ while grooming his protégé to understand that “lunch is for wimps”, and if you want a friend, “get a dog”.  Then in September 2008, the world's media zoomed in on besuited young staffers exiting tall buildings, clutching a card-board box of possessions, as Lehman Brothers, and a succession of other global financial institutions collapsed around the world.

There was much gnashing of teeth and genuine alarm as the financial markets nose-dived. In shock, the world became quickly accustomed to a new innovation called government “bailouts”, as a genuine use of taxpayers’ funds.  In a world today where the word “crisis” is perhaps somewhat overused, that time genuinely felt like a real humdinger as the world’s media, politicians, and general public looked on in horror as the stability in the markets simply disappeared and the economy contracted and fell like a suddenly deflating hot-air balloon. Even the Governments’ hastily concocted parachute could not alleviate much of the real-world pain felt in the disrupted markets, emptying workplaces and crowded benefits offices.  

This summer, I find myself immersed in a new book called Trust, by an American author called Hernan Diaz. The focus of his book is not the financial crisis of the early part of this century, but the financial machinations that caused the Great Depression in the 1930s, a crisis initiated by market crashes on Wall Street in 1929, with reverberations around world. Against that backdrop he tells the story of Andrew Bevel, a Rockefeller type who bestrides the financial world accumulating astronomical wealth, like a 1920’s Warren Buffett, but with an emotional vacuity and mystique even amongst those who felt they knew him well.

Suitably then, the story of Bevel’s wealth and his relationship with his young wife is told from four different perspectives; as an adapted novel, by Bevel himself, by his hired researcher Ida, and by Bevel’s wife Mildred. The opening section, a succinct third-person narrative is written in an elegant style, with a brevity of language and tone that is worthily one of the most compelling pieces of storytelling I have read in years.  When Ida, Bevel’s brilliant researcher and scribe reads it she is similarly stunned. Then in a claustrophobic nexus of acute illness, big pharma and high-stakes finance, it ends in horror, and personal madness and pain. The next three sections re-tell the tale very differently, of the man, of the money, of the strange genesis of the Bevel’s relationship with Mildred, of her music, patronage of the arts and the intrigues of New York high society.  A strange imaginative blend then of Succession, and The Great Gatsby.

But as Diaz takes us deeper down a rabbit hole of mystery and of phantasmagorical wealth - and all the allure that money creates, he ensures we struggle to come to the get to grips with the truth. Quite literally, who do we Trust? The idiosyncratic and contradictory narrative is like John Fowles’ A Maggot, a jigsaw puzzle like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost.  As the reader we have to join the dots, distracted by the contrasting perspectives on the destructive power of unfettered capitalism, set against a caricature of militant anarcho-socialism, literally told from across the Hudson river, far removed from Bevel’s life, as a dirty kitchen sink story.  It would be inappropriate and an enormous spoiler to give the game away, but as Diaz lets us dig deeper into the psychological drama of Bevel and Mildred, Diaz reveals the very specific and shocking reason for the Wall Street Crash of 1929, what caused it and why.   

Which brought me back with a veritable bump to the recent economic travails – and stories again of Banks being “bailed out”, merged and ‘absorbed’. It is almost a hundred years since Bevel built his great fortune, riding a wave of pulped prime markets, and of governments printing money, amidst a world of oligarch style tycoons avariciously grappling for wealth, power and influence, and here we are again, facing the consequences, of what happens when that bubble inevitably bursts.