William Leith: my problem with money
It’s like I actively want to be poor. Like I’d rather be poor. I’ve never told anyone this, but I have a mental disorder in the area of finance. I am driven by a mechanism designed to prevent me from being rich; worse, it masquerades as a mechanism designed to do exactly the opposite.
It is an enemy agent, it lies deep in the wiring of my brain, and I don’t know how it works.
I know I need to dismantle this mechanism and replace it with a new one before I die a pauper’s death. But I’m terrified of doing this because I suspect that the mechanism is, actually, me.
Money is weird, anyway. We’re supposed to instinctively understand it. But we really don’t. For instance, most people think it’s real. It’s not. But because we think it’s real, it is real. It somehow emerged from the early murk of human interaction.
It is us. It’s our masterpiece. It’s killing us.
I consider my own financial situation. Just thinking about it, I am sick with dread; icy dread spreading up from my stomach into my chest and neck, and now I can’t stop thinking about it, the bad thoughts and feelings are seeping out and getting everywhere. It’s like a crime scene that I must clean up before I can even begin to get away. And the more I try to clean it, the dirtier it gets.
But I must not think like this!
OK. My financial situation. Like most nation states, I’m currently running a deficit – in other words, my life is costing me more money than I make. A deficit – it’s not the same as a debt. A deficit is from the spending you’re doing now and will be punished for in the future. A debt is from the spending you did in the past. It’s the punishment you’re already taking.
I’m aware that I’ve asked for this punishment – this abuse. It is happening to me because, on one level, I must want it to happen to me. I hate it. I can’t even think about it. But I have to. But I can’t. But I must.
I am being abused by secured and unsecured loans, unpaid bills and taxes, fines, penalty fees, pending court cases and cases I have already lost, or not contested, or forgotten about. The cases come back as different types of letters, with this or that tone, and then as actual people, mostly men, not well dressed – they particularly have no idea about shoes. When they come, these men (and occasionally women), I am very polite indeed. I serve tea and offer food. I think it makes a difference.
I am driven by a desire to spend more money than I have, so I borrow money, but I don’t pay it back promptly. I know I have an obligation to pay it back. I should pay it back. To be clear: I intend to.
And so people come to my house. We talk, and all is quiet for a while.
Give me time, I tell them.
Look, I’m not a money kind of person. Growing up, I was too privileged to think very much about money. Now things have changed – now the tide has gone out – I’m not privileged enough not to. I have fallen through the cracks. It’s nobody’s fault. Yes it is. It’s mine.
It’s my fault.
I have a handy formula, filed away somewhere – where is it? Ah, OK. Money, the bedrock of society, is debt, because it arrives in the economy in the form of loans.
And loans are based on interest, on interest rates. And interest rates are based on the understanding of risk, the probability that something will happen: in this case how likely the borrower is to default on the loan.
And the concept of probability is often expressed in the form of odds.
So money, the thing that underpins our whole society, is a concept based on odds, and therefore gambling.
So gambling is the bedrock of society.
This is something all rich people know. They’re all essentially gamblers. It’s all gambling.
Money is lascivious and narcissistic. It lusts after itself. Then it replicates. To make money, you have to be a matchmaker. You have to introduce the money to the money. That’s why people like to gamble. It’s because the money inside them is itching for some action. It’s always hungry, like an addict.
I once got a cheque in the post; this was years ago, when I was earning – or rather, I suppose a better word would be getting – a lot of money, getting a lot of money but hugely in debt. There’s a reason for this, to do with the miragelike qualities of money, which I will try to explain. In any case, getting a lot of money, or even quite a lot of money, was not good for me. I wish it had been, but it was not.
I was climbing a mountain of money. And I slipped.
So, this cheque. The amount on the cheque was a little more than the average annual wage for somebody in full-time employment, before tax. It was addressed to me. It had nothing to do with me. It was a glitch. A case of mistaken identity. So I made a couple of calls. And I sent a fax. This was in the days of faxes. I called and faxed. “Sorry,” I said, “but…”
“No,” said the guy. “Don’t be sorry. We’re the ones who should be sorry.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I think I should…”
“No,” said the guy. “You should do nothing. It’s our fault. You don’t need to do anything.”
This was a funny moment. I could have insisted. I could have said, look. But I did not. I thought: let’s just hang on a moment. For once in my life!
And: hey, maybe it is my money. People are always telling me I owe them money.
And: maybe, just this once, they owe me.
And: in any case, let’s put it into my account.
And: for safekeeping.
And: if nothing else.
And: while I think about it.
And: while I at least think about it. The money was gone in a shocking amount of time. Shockingly quick. Bills paid, nice clothes, decent goods and services. A brief holiday from everyday poverty. I don’t mean real poverty, of course I don’t. But everybody’s everyday life feels like poverty, however rich you are. It’s one of our society’s darker truths. The holiday lasted maybe 40 days. Then the money was gone, with nothing to show for it. I mean, it just got sucked away.
When you have money, it feels like a handful of dust, and everything around you acts like a vacuum cleaner.
I was having a talk with my accountant.
I said: “What if somebody sent you some money?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, what if somebody, hypothetically, sent you a cheque?”
“Sent you a cheque?”
“I don’t know. But let’s say somebody sent you a cheque… out of the blue.”
“Has this happened to you?”
“I’m saying if it happened. If somebody said, look, have this money. And you said, OK then, yes, I’ll have it, thanks very much…”
Anyway, my accountant was livid. I might have committed a criminal act, is what he said.
Then I had a phone call. From a woman, who was investigating “the missing money”. She came to see me. Had access to all my accounts. This doesn’t look good, Mr Leith, she said. I feel a voice telling me to skip over the next bit. But I am forcing myself not to heed the voice.
I was lucky. I still had the fax I’d sent them. It was just enough. No criminal prosecution. I just had to pay the money back. Plus some interest. Which meant I had to pay more interest on the debts I would now pay back more slowly, plus the penalties on the taxes I would now pay back more slowly.
But it was so easy. So easy to slip. To slip and slide. And that is, I think, partly why I’m frightened of money. It is oily. It oils your path. It’s slippery underfoot.
It started, thousands of years ago, with credit – from the Latin “credo”, which means: I believe, or trust. Talented people always have a surplus. And that surplus becomes a form of credit. And that belief, or trust, begins to function as money. And then someone invents actual money. With actual money, everybody can exchange with everybody else. That’s because everybody is willing to swap things for money, which is, in turn, because money can be turned into anything.
The more we exchange, the more we specialise; the more we specialise, the more we innovate; the more we innovate, the more we exchange. It’s self-reinforcing, like an addiction. The world gets better, faster and faster. And yet. Something worries me. The world gets faster and more interconnected, and the more interconnected it gets, the faster it changes, and the faster it changes, the more interconnected it gets.
One day, money that travels from New York to London in seconds is overtaken on the way by smarter money moving many times as fast, money that buys and sells at the right price, locking in a profit, making trades in Tokyo and Frankfurt, and getting back to Manhattan before the slow money has even crossed the water.
Our world is complex and interconnected. When one thing changes, everything else must change along with it. It is full of cascades and avalanches. Suddenly, abruptly, something has happened. Out of the blue and extreme. Billions have been wiped from the economy and entire countries have been plunged into poverty. People are dying, people will die. Still, the rich will get richer, and yet richer, and the more money they have, the more they’ll want. And after this? Has a tipping point been reached?
The thing I was going to explain. I got some well-paid work. So I had a lot of money. So I upgraded my life, mostly in the area of services. After a while, being able to have better services changes your outlook, even though you don’t see it at the time.
Every day of your life, you avoid some kind of confrontation by buying your way out of it. So you become soft and cowardly. You buy luxury. What you’re buying is the privilege of being able to indulge your inner coward without being shamed, which is addictive. Your inner coward, it turns out, is also an abusive bully. You keep on saying, yes, OK, and then you buy yourself out of something. The money just drains away. And then, after a period of being abused, certain things, because you need them to, begin to look fuzzy.
Things like the spirit of the law. And, at a specific, crucial moment, the letter of the law. It’s like deciding to have two drinks, but then after two drinks you’re not the same person who decided to have two drinks. Sort of like that.
Everybody slips in their own way, for their own reasons. It’s so personal. So intimate. So embarrassing.
And then, eventually, somebody knocks on your door.
The Trick: Why Some People Can Make Money and Other People Can’t, by William Leith, is published by Bloomsbury at £20. Order it for £16.80 at guardianbookshop.com. Audiobook and ebook editionsare also available online