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.
This 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…
Read on Substack → Apr 24, 2026I promised this in a note yesterday – my latest theory of the “vibecession”. I still think that a lot of the reason why people get confused by this is that they have narrowed their scope of inquiry down to a sort of treatment/response model with a relatively short lag; when I was discussing it on The Socials, economists kept on dismissing potential explanations because they didn’t show a…
Read on Substack → Apr 22, 2026This post from Jenn Pahlka (detailing a debate with Dave Guarino , who is also very good) reminded me that it’s been a while since I talked about Goodhart’s Law. As Jenn says, it’s awfully tempting to say that “we just need to get the metrics right”, but the history of attempts to do this is pretty disappointing. Does that mean that it’s a chimera, or are there some ways of creating good…
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