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MENUSpeaker Dan Davies is expert on financial and economic crises, financial crimes and regulations, and on the near term future of the economic and political world.
Dan Davies is the author of Lying For Money, a study of commercial fraud and its importance to the global economy published by Profile Books. He works as Head of Research for Frontline Analysts, the financial outsourcing firm and provides consulting and idea generation services to a small group of investment bank and hedge fund clients. He also publishes the occasional geopolitical newsletter Predicto, in which he forecast accurately forecast the development of the 2015 Greek crisis as well as the size, shape and narrow margin of Donald Trump’s Presidential victory, and edits the Mediobanca Regulatory Observatory, providing detailed weekly research on European banking.
As an economist at the Bank of England, he attended some of the most interesting meetings of the 1990s, including the collapse of Barings, the Mexico Crisis and the rescue of Long Term Capital Management. He then spent ten years working through the minor divisions of British stockbroking, arriving at Credit Suisse in 2007, just in time to watch the global banking industry collapse, with a front seat view.
He was a key member of the CS and Exane BNP Paribas research teams which won the Institutional Investor All-Europe Research polls on three occasions and developed a reputation in the market as one of the few people in the City who could make reading about financial regulation bearable.
Dan now comments on financial and markets developments for publications including the FT and New Yorker and provides jaundiced views on the foibles of the investment banking industry to readers of eFinancialcareers.com. He is a familiar voice on Finance Twitter and appears in ‘Top Markets Tweeter’ lists.
In early 2024 Dan Davies published his latest book The Unaccountability Machine. The subtitle to the book is ‘Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions and How the World Lost its Mind’.
In the book Dan Davies revisits Stafford Beer’s concept of cybernetics and the idea that we should see an organisation as an artificial intelligence, one capable of taking decisions at odds with the intentions of its members.
Rory Sutherland wrote of the book: ‘Wonderful … [Dan Davies] tackles very contemporary problems by reviving the discipline of cybernetics … with passing discursions involving squirrels, Brian Eno, Milton Friedman and a well-deserved kicking delivered to the discipline of modern economics’.
And in the FT Tim Harford wrote: ‘Davies explains the basic logic of an accountability sink: decision-making power is removed from individuals you might want to shout at, and made instead by an algorithm or some distant committee both ignorant of and immune to your objections’.
For availability, speaking enquiries and fees or to book Dan Davies contact a Specialist Speakers agent on 01455 633289 or email Specialist Speakers