I sweat when people talk about money. I get itchy and awkward and want to go to the toilet again or look at passing seagulls, if there are any. High finance is low attention time for me. But I know that we can’t live without it.
I know if the money markets stop moving your mum and dad’s pension fund money around – £70 trillion in all – then they will have to get a Saturday job. I know that when the sticky stuff hit the fan in 2008 we came near to catastrophe. Then there would have been no social security for anyone. No knee ops, no school dinners – no nothing.
So I know that high finance is the backbone, the very skeleton of all of our prosperity, semi-prosperity or non-prosperity. I know that even the most abject among us, the most marginalised, would be even worse off without high finance. I know that even the beggars in the streets of the world need the world of high finance to be functioning, for them to have even their cursorily distributed handouts.
But I know also that high finance often makes poor people poorer. So, you’ve got to have all these big bucks buzzing around the world to keep even the most inefficient or unequal system going. But wouldn’t it be great if some of the buzz buzzed in the direction of the neediest?
I have known Steve Round for about 10 years. I met him at a meeting about social money, about utilising investment in investing in social justice. I encouraged him to join The Big Issue Foundation board of trustees. Now he’s the chair of that august body. He is also the chair of the Ecology Building Society. He comes from Manchester and lives in Staffordshire. Sometimes he wears a suit that makes him look like a miner on a day off from a DH Lawrence novel. Perhaps Lady Loverley’s Chatter?
I know that even the most abject among us, the most marginalised, would be even worse off without high finance
Now he has me sitting in the Cambridge Youth Hostel Association (YHA) café, talking about The Change Account. About an alternative way of holding a current account. About you putting your wages, your social security payments or wherever you get your money from into an account that works socially.