Dan Davies and Darren Sharma on finance, risk, offshore research, and the industry as we see it.
FT contributor. Author of The Unaccountability Machine and Lying for Money. His Substack, Back of Mind, has over 10,000 subscribers.
Frontline's head of quality assurance, 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.
I promised this earlier in the week, and it’s mainly a fun post; maybe there will be something heavier on Friday. Over the bank holiday, my wife was bemoaning the extent to which her Vinted (international readers – it’s a British second-hand and vintage clothes website) favourites list had got out of hand, and sent my oldest daughter a message asking what she should do. She got this reply:…
Read on Substack → May 1, 2026It seems that if you’re concerned that a subject doesn’t seem to have been addressed at all in the literature, no matter how hard you look, the best thing to do is write about it yourself, at which point the literature will start throwing itself at you as soon as it’s too late to do anything about it. As well as “ The Blame Game ” by Christopher Hood, my local charity shop recently disgorged…
Read on Substack → Apr 29, 2026This is a thought that’s been on my mind – I tried it out at a seminar the other week and although I don’t think anyone was particularly convinced, nobody seemed to think it was ridiculous, so let’s see if you lot can talk me out of it. The basic idea is something like “risk aversion is an intrinsic property of some kinds of organisations” and that attempts to get the Department of Transport…
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