The Price of Clarity
The greater the distance between the language of elites and ordinary people, the greater the risk of unrest. To the extent that complexity in finance or politics creates new opportunities to deceive, impedes understanding, or blurs lines of accountability, we should aim to reduce it.
LONDON -- “Through the contrivance and cunning of stock jobbers there hath been brought in such a complication of knavery and cozenage, such a mystery of iniquity, and such an unintelligible jargon of terms to involve it in, as were never known in any other age or country.” Jonathan Swift’s eighteenth-century barb resonates in today’s world of financial “intermediation”: now, as then, finance shrouds its “complication of knavery and cozenage” in “unintelligible jargon.” As US President Barack Obama explained in a speech in April: “Many practices were so opaque and complex that few within these companies – let alone those charged with oversight – were fully aware of the massive wagers being made.”
LONDON -- “Through the contrivance and cunning of stock jobbers there hath been brought in such a complication of knavery and cozenage, such a mystery of iniquity, and such an unintelligible jargon of terms to involve it in, as were never known in any other age or country.” Jonathan Swift’s eighteenth-century barb resonates in today’s world of financial “intermediation”: now, as then, finance shrouds its “complication of knavery and cozenage” in “unintelligible jargon.” As US President Barack Obama explained in a speech in April: “Many practices were so opaque and complex that few within these companies – let alone those charged with oversight – were fully aware of the massive wagers being made.”