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.
This is going to be a short post, because I am deep in the weeds doing book edits. (If I haven’t sent you something I promised, that’s why, sorry and I’ll be right on to it! ).
Read on Substack → Oct 28, 2026I have now read Liz Truss’s book “Bank Job”, and I largely agree with Toby Nangle at Alphaville ; it is almost impressive that someone has been able to bring together absolutely all of the wrong criticisms of the OBR, central bank independence and the culture of the Treasury. These are all some pretty criticisable institutions! But Truss’s book basically keeps repeating the theme of “I, a…
Read on Substack → Oct 23, 2026Slightly related to Wednesday’s “Thatcherfuturism” post, the way that I’ve expressed part of that argument in the past is to say that whenever someone cuts corners or forces a project through against opposition, they are guilty of “a little bit of theft from the common stock of trust and goodwill”. Part of the original manifesto of this blog was to “take jokes and metaphors seriously, you…
Read on Substack →