He wrote: “the book is fun to read and extremely timely. If you’ve ever fantasized about what would happen if the people who helped create the global financial crisis started getting serially murdered, you should give this book a go.”

Start reading Dead Bankers

Start reading Ghosts

A sampler of both

Early last year, I set out to write a thriller set in the world of high finance. I ended up writing two. Dead Bankers and Ghosts are set in the world of hedge fund traders and private equity moguls, oligarchs and commodity barons.

Having seen and learned enough about these worlds, I firmly believe that what goes on there today is as significant as what used to occur behind the scenes of the Cold War. Our fates now lie in the hands of individuals about whom we know desperately little. Politicians depend on them. Armies march for them. All of us, one way or another, work for them. The books have the same central character: Benjamin Wright. In my more ambitious moments, I like to think of him as a James Bond or Jack Ryan of the 21st century, an investigator steeped in the mysterious and often deadly world of international finance. A Thomas Crown-like figure who can unpick the most complex schemes.

This month only, you can download the first 50 pages of each of the books by clicking on the covers. If you like them, you can buy a full pdf or paperback at Lulu, or a Kindle version at Amazon. Or write to me and I’ll send you a free one.

I’ve set up my own imprint, Whistler Publishing, to publish them in multiple formats soon after I’ve finished them. I’m also working on an iPad/iPhone app so that I can deliver them a chapter a day to subscribers – the 19th century serialization model brought up to date.

My mental soundtrack for Benjamin Wright is Air’s La Femme d’Argent.

I’d love to hear what you think.

You can read it here.

The grotesque thing about all this is that it’s the result of awful hiring policies at businesses. Businesses say they want one thing – people who can communicate, think clearly and independently – and yet they hire another, students with “relevant” experience, whether a business related degree or lots of summer internships. If they want communicators, clear thinkers and creative people, they should not be pressuring schools to do away with liberal arts and pure science in favor of supposedly “practical” subjects.

At an undergraduate level, these “practical” subjects teach students a fleeting set of briefly relevant skills rather than habits and practices which might last a lifetime. When children learn to read, they don’t learn to read company reports. They learn to read things which stimulate their minds and a spirit of inquiry. It should be no different at undergraduate institutions. If you want to breed a generation of articulate, imaginative thinkers, the very last thing you should be doing is shoe-horning them all into undergraduate business studies, where they are taught an inexact science couched in banalities.

I wish colleges would fight back harder against this. Students are having what should be one of the greatest periods of intellectual growth in their lives stunted and the academy is getting its chain yanked by the HR divisions of American business. They say they want creative people because it makes them sound more attractive as companies. Their actions suggest they hire narrowly skilled drones. Are they lying? Or are they just too blinkered to figure out where the creative, communicative people are? And too chicken to hire them?

For anyone who hasn’t seen this, Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford graduation speech makes a wonderful case for the benefits of an unconventional education.

Some highlights from the NY Times piece:

“Consider the change captured in the annual survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, of more than 400,000 incoming freshmen. In 1971, 37 percent responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed: 78 percent identified wealth as a goal, while 48 percent were after a meaningful philosophy.”

“We believe that we do our best for students when we give them tools to be analytical, to be able to gather information and to determine the validity of that information themselves, particularly in this world where people don’t filter for you anymore,” Dr. Coleman [the president of the University of Michigan] says. “We want to teach them how to make an argument, how to defend an argument, to make a choice.” These are the skills that liberal arts colleges in particular have prided themselves on teaching. But these colleges also say they have the hardest time explaining the link between what they teach and the kind of job and salary a student can expect on the other end.”

“The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”

Meanwhile for the humanities, it was a grimmer picture: English, from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent; foreign languages and literatures, from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent; philosophy and religious studies, from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent; history from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent.

There are many reasons for all this: the ineffectiveness of humanities teaching; the way in which children are forced to choose their careers at an ever younger age; the competitiveness of the economy; the explosive growth in often worthless higher education.

But if one in five American undergraduates are now spending three or four years studying business, what exactly are they being taught that contributes to the economic, social or cultural betterment of this country? Or are they spending their time and money studying subjects which would be better taught by companies in a few day/night courses to those who need to know them?

The piece suggests Goldman created securities knowing they were going to plummet in value. Sold them aggressively. And then bet against them, leaving the holders of these collateralized bonds to suffer. This then contributed to the freezing of the credit markets and everything else we’ve seen since 2007.

Of course, it’s not all Goldman’s fault. Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank et al. were all doing the same thing. But if I were an executive at any of these firms today, I’d be seriously worried about men with handcuffs and arrest warrants walking onto my trading floor in the coming months.

In my local newspaper this month, there was a profile of a local fence builder, Don Banks. He has been building fences all over Connecticut for thirty years, from small garden fences to horse rings to long, winding fences around enormous farms.

Over the past year, he said, he had received more orders than ever for vegetable garden fences. In this part of the world, that means a fence tall enough to deter deer and buried deep enough into the ground to guard against moles and woodchucks.

Though Banks did not say it, there are a few forces driving this sudden demand for vegetable gardens in America, all of which are shafts of sunlight in what remain gloomy skies for America and the world.

The first is a growing disgust with our system of food production. Over the past few years, a torrent of books and films has come out attacking the system of mass agriculture. Read or watch them and once you know what goes on in breeding farms and slaughter houses it’s unlikely you’ll ever want to eat an American chicken or steak again.

This has coincided with a growing environmental consciousness. People want to eat food produced locally, not shipped thousands of miles on carbon spewing planes, trains and trucks. And they want it to be healthy and clean, not pumped full of preservatives and pesticides.

Another force behind the vegetable garden movement has been a desire among Americans to bring everything closer to home. If these last two years have proved anything, it has been the cost of being over-exposed to others, whether it is banks who lend you money, supply chains which encircle the world, employers who slash jobs or a government which is plunging ever further into debt.

Self-sufficiency is what everyone covets: a solar array on the roof providing electricity, a well providing clean water; gold in your portfolio in case the currency goes pop; and vegetables growing in your own soil.

All of which is wonderful news. These are lessons we might have learned from our grandparents, or the famously healthy, long-lived, hard-working fishermen of Okinawa. Don’t rely on others. Provide for yourself. And instead of spending your weekends shopping or playing golf, dig those hands in the dirt and produce something.

At a moment when the government is stretched on every front, individuals are re-learning the art of fending for themselves.

A generation has learned the true cost of cheap toys from China and cheap oil from the Middle East. It’s not just the price you pay in a store or at the pump. There are global, economic and strategic consequences to depending on the labor and resources of others. You become vulnerable in ways you might never have imagined, not all of them pleasant.

The business equivalent of the novice vegetable gardener is the entrepreneur. And now the world is looking at America and wondering. What next? What great business is going to surge out of the ground in Silicon Valley or New York to propel the next phase of economic growth?

I was recently in Kansas City visiting the Kauffman Foundation, a center for thinkers, writers and business people devoted to the promotion of entrepreneurship. The view there is that America’s economic salvation lies at is always has in the minds and hands of entrepreneurs. Nearly all net job creation in the United States since 1980 has been generated by firms operating less than five years. New companies drive this economy. Entrepreneurs drive it.

There is a sense at Kauffman that the people who have spent the past two years struggling to meet payroll, fighting off creditors and suppliers are perhaps now, finally, starting to breathe a little more easily. It has been an extreme trial, but it will have forged a new class of super-fit, super-entrepreneurs who will thrive as the economy improves. The opportunities for them will be vast.

Japan too, it seems, is retreating into itself, pulling back from its great global alliances and fierce economic competition to focus on its own needs. It is what anyone does after a period of trauma. You go home, you push the world away and you rebuild your strength.

The noisy advocates of globalization and flat markets will say this is a terrible mistake, and that the only path to growth lies in throwing open one’s doors and racing against the world. That may be true. But any act of self-healing should be applauded not criticized. We all need moments to pause and take breath, to dig in the soil, to take care of ourselves and build a fence against predators. It is how individuals, entrepreneurs, businesses and countries can recover their health and spirits and grow.

To build a vegetable garden is an act of great optimism and faith in oneself. That Americans are doing so in ever increasing numbers bodes well for 2010.