Dan Davies and Darren Sharma on finance, risk, offshore research, and the industry as we see it.
Bank of England, then seventeen years as a sell-side equity analyst. FT contributor. Author of The Unaccountability Machine and Lying for Money. His Substack, Back of Mind, has over 10,000 subscribers.
Managing Director since 2015. Heads equity research and quality assurance.
Regulatory policy analyst. Worked on the 1995 Mexico crisis and the first Financial Stability Report.
JPMorgan Cazenove, Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas (Exane), among others. Member of teams that won the Extel and Institutional Investor European awards.
Writes a weekly newsletter on bank regulation from an investment perspective.
University of Oxford, BA PPE (First). London Business School, MSc Finance (Distinction).
The Unaccountability Machine (Profile, 2024), longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year. Lying for Money (Profile, 2018).
Financial Times and FT Alphaville. Also the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Frontline's Managing Director, in the FT.
Dan writes regularly for the FT's Alphaville on finance, regulation, and institutional failure.
Dan's newsletter on accountability, systems, and what goes wrong when organisations stop thinking. Over 10,000 subscribers.
Rushed today, so I think I will deal with one short [POSTSCRIPT: not exactly short, sorry! ], but I think significant point today and write the longer piece on Friday, with respect to one of this blog’s constant bugbears, the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility [1] . Basically, the general theme is that some messengers are really bad, passing on incorrect messages and accidentally or…
Read on Substack → Sep 18, 2026It just came to me when I was drinking a cup of coffee – nobody, particularly me, wants me to write a big “here’s how it’s done” manifesto, nobody would listen to it and probably rightly so. The point of this blog is to put up ideas which stick in the back of your mind, so that people can use them for their own thinking. I don’t always stick to it but that was the original plan.
Read on Substack → Sep 16, 2026I have Many Thorts about the regulation of agentic artificial intelligence (partly influenced by this excellent new book , mainly about financial regulation). But I think they might have to wait until Friday, because before I can get into them, I need to explain, to myself and to you lot, how these things work, and consequently where the “regulatable surface” is easiest to find. This is not…
Read on Substack →