The Art Of Modern Finance

I can't say this is new to me; I have encountered it many times before, especially during the late Eighties and early Nineties, when I worked for a brilliant Sydney Merchant Banker by the name of Jurisic long since retired. There were a lot of brilliant people around the place in those days: I recall one of the most fascinating individuals I have ever met - Karl Teuchert - the woodcraftsman and designer who designed a large amount of the furniture on which Federal Senators in Australia sit. He was a man full of energy and passion and extremely generous with his knowledge of materials to all those who sought him out. Karl worked almost exclusively with an Australian hardwood known as Jarrah, which is similar to the rare and expensive American Cocobolo.

But I digress – slightly.

A beautiful pic unconnected to the gun debate

I am driving at making the point that today it is extremely rare to find someone, anyone -, who, knowing a great deal about their subject matter, will care to divulge a lot of that knowledge fluidly.

It is simply far too difficult to keep the commercial value of any specialised knowledge intact once that knowledge is allowed to drift unescorted out 'into the wild' as it were.

The banker Jurisic owned a small boutique investments house, and Teuchert owned two fairly large craft workshops in which he employed about thirty highly talented craftspeople. Both of them could supply virtually completely unique products to a high-end and individualistic market that was not able to source the same things elsewhere. And, more to the point, this 'high-end' market was not prepared at the time to be satisfied with substitutes of a lesser quality and standard.

One just has to say, however, that it is now moot if the China market produces knock-offs of a lesser quality anymore. Sad to say but true, Chinese film directors make substantially better movies than anyone in Hollywood, e-Readers are cheaper and better if you buy them from the back-alleys in Hong Kong, and space shots launched from inside China are safer than anything Morton Thiokol or TRW ever did. This will not last. But it might go on for a thousand years yet before 'it doesn't last,' if you gather what I mean.

Anyway, back to my first sentence. I recently had the experience, once again, of watching a group of intelligent people turn to water in the face of the serious prospect of actually making big money now. Far easier, apparently, was it for them to spend a lot of money going around the whole world visiting people in high places just to hear those mysterious 'yes, yes, yesses,' which really meant 'no.' Unlike the Eighties though, today, there is only the one single rare diamond that you will find once in your lifetime, rather than being able to walk up the road a little ways to cast an unhurried eye over all the other diamonds singing much similar tunes. And the one single rare diamond has forsooth even a spirit being within, which moves and lives and thinks – just like those fabled stones in the Garden of Aladdin.

To possess such a stone one must employ a young thin lad, who can easily fit down that Underworld Entrance through which no fat, well-fed and watered, modern Middle Class merchant can go.

There is much in that sentence, no doubt, and it is by no means a terminal statement. But what is absolutely certain, and sure, and true, is that the means and the mechanisms and pathways to financing, of both the high and of the low kind, may be found quite possibly only in the minds of strange sorcerers claiming to be the long lost brother of your lately deceased and much beloved father... The thrill and the magic of financing important things is – and quite possibly always has been – a secret knowledge, and an art.

Back when I was a callow youth (never was exactly that, though), then, and even now, there is this strange holiness and religiosity about finance that many many people have; it is a thing which is given to you apparently, and to you alone, especially, and above many others, because you are worthy, and you do things in a certain prescribed way that others do not. It is in so many ways a blessing adorning the worthy alone, by the gods of money.

Whereas of course it is not anything of those things. It is simply a person knowing where money is and where it flows inside a dark cavern into which few go and thus where one might still get some before a thousand hungry gnats swarm in to steal it all and to make of yet another cool and fertile place an arid desert patch. As they do. And I fear that those who are survivors in arid places are symbiotic creatures of those gnats. They seem to be in every place that has a want of necessary and adequate funding. And to me, at least, they seem to have a special relationship with gnats.