Driving back from Dubai last Saturday after the Rugby Sevens, my son insisted that we listen to Mika, a curly-haired singer who performed at the Emirates Palace hotel a year or so ago. Each song is catchy, relentlessly jolly, and quick. They're over almost before they've begun. At the end of the disc, I flicked through my options and settled on Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here.
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My son listened intently but was soon distracted, and absolutely horrified by the seemingly endless musical introduction.
"When are they going to start singing?" he asked. "This intro is lasting longer than a game of sevens."
We timed it: the singing doesn't begin until 8 minutes and 43 seconds into the first track. I tend to agree with him. I never really liked Pink Floyd, although I do like the title song of this album. It didn't help them that I hit 15 at the time Punk music was born. Pink Floyd was the soundtrack of my older brothers. I would yawn at the long, drawn-out ramblings of Dark Side of the Moon, much preferring The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, and above all, The Clash.
You may be wondering what all this has to do with the business world. I can explain. Just as the music of a previous generation was dull and long-winded, so too was finance. With a couple of exceptions - mainly racy Old Etonians such as Jimmy Goldsmith and a few foreigners - finance was a dull game. Most people went to the City of London to have lunch.
Central bankers in those days were dry old dogs, rarely seen in public and hardly recognised by anyone but their wives and retainers.
The BBC has been doing a series on the financialisation of the world - how money took over. One extract contains an interview between a radio reporter and the head of American Express. The credit card had just been invented.
"And would you let your wife have such a card?' asked the plummy reporter without a hint of sexism. "Absolutely," replied the credit card boss. "And we'd be delighted to let everybody's wife have a card."
I bet he would. By the end of the 1970s, finance was beginning to pogo and was even getting sexy. Gradually, but at an increasing pace, the speed at which people could acquire finance including credit cards and mortgages accelerated. When I first bought a house in the 1980s, you needed a deposit of at least 10 per cent. In France you still need a deposit of at least that much, but elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon world, you could get a mortgage of 110 per cent of the purchase price. You could also write your own application form. Need a bigger mortgage? Then why not pretend that you are earning US$100,000 (Dh367,330) a year rather than $50,000?
In retrospect, it is easy to see that we were sitting on a time bomb. Punkonomics, as I am dubbing this phenomenon, was always going to end in tears, just as punk ended when Sid Vicious died.
The answer, of course, is that bankers should return to being dull and long-winded. We don't want punk bankers, but bankers so grey and tedious that even their wives won't acknowledge them in public. Instead we have characters such as Matthieu Pigasse, who smirked out of the pages of The Wall Street Journal this week. He's a Frenchman working for Lazard Bank. He also owns a music magazine called Les Inrockuptibles, a stake in Le Monde, and calls himself a "pro-market Socialist" without any sense of irony. He is apparently advising the Greek government on how to reduce its debt.
"I don't see any contradiction here," he told the paper. "I think you can defend ideas that are not, financially speaking, in your interest."
Punk rockers were famously useless musicians. Many of the guitarists knew only three chords and played those badly. But they had great energy - much of it chemically induced - and they blew the old boring guard away.
It's one of the pleasant ironies of life that one of the most high-profile protesters against capitalism, who swung from a Union flag on the Cenotaph during demonstrations in London last December, was 21-year-old Charlie Gilmour, the stepson of David Gilmour, Pink Floyd's vocalist and lead guitarist. The boring old musician's adopted son was willing to mix it up in public, but his exuberance led to a jail sentence. He's just been let out of jail, and was pictured walking out of HMP Wayland in Norfolk with a cigarette tucked behind his ear towards a Mercedes-Benz limo in which his father was sitting.
We need more of these ageing patriarchs to regain control of the world economy just as Gilmour picked up his son, and fewer Monsieur Pigasses. Mr Pigasse's favourite band? The Clash, of course. He and I may share musical tastes, but I'd like to see someone old and dull, with interests in campanology and tree planting perhaps, playing a lead role in getting Greece's debt paid off, rather than a man who likes to appear in Vogue Italia with two shirt buttons undone. Call me old-fashioned, but bankers should have buttoned-down shirts, rolled-up sleeves and know 50 chords, not just three.
