It’s okay to like money.

I must preface this with the fact that I am speaking from my experience living in secular countries with an arguably latent system of ‘western’ values, or at a minimum, individuals of any background that would be partial to the sentiments of Timothy 6:10.

Cash is gauche, vulgar, occasionally perverse and evil, and inherently uninteresting to most — well, at least publicly. Its discussion is relegated to private spaces, family and friends, but it can’t be denied that everyone has a strong relationship with it, and nobody is indifferent to it. This gives it an exclusivity that can’t be said for other interests. Not everyone is a fan of the grateful dead. You might even be uninterested in civil engineering. Although I’m not sure whether I’ve ever met anybody that is impartial to money.

An investigation into why it is a common denominator could span several pages, but its USP, so to speak, is that it gives us access to our insatiable economic wants. I will broaden the term economic wants to encompass desires for capital allocation, in the form of philanthropy or business. Money is the constraint that all of us live under, even the richest among us. In fact, if you’re reading this, it is extremely likely that you are in the upper decile in almost any measurable way; yet probably also have an interesting and complex relationship with the green stuff, even if you pretend to not like money — yet use it to buy the green stuff that you must be smoking.

So, where am I going with this? One, it would be nice if we could be a little bit more frank about our collective intentions, ultimately making the topic a less of a taboo. For instance, note the oddity with respect to the lack of transparency in remuneration at your workplace. I’m sure there is an MBA out there that has dreamt up an interesting and convoluted argument backed up by shoddy journals about why compensation is private and undiscussed, outside of reasons that are likely more true, such as the gross inequalities that lie beneath the ‘vulgarity’ of discussing compensation.

My other gripe would be with the industry that I have made my bed in: Finance. If you are not a finance professional you might be quite surprised by this, but it is awash with people pretending to not like money. Some personalities in the space are quite candid about their intentions, but the space generally does not permit this and you will immediately be scoffed at. Alternatively, individuals (and the industry by extension) would rather farcically engage in a veil of misdirection, cope, and sometimes would even fool themselves into thinking that they are not acting in a self-interested way. A common one would be quips from the intermediary space about a drive for ‘facilitating people with the ability to reach their financial goals’ an even funnier one would be from HFT firms, famous for the largest net profit margins and salaries in the world (chiefly as a result of their prowess in market-making, flow prediction, arbitrage, and their race to the lowest latencies, all of which is a zero-sum competition against other market participants) yet they describe their work in quaint and cutsey terms, dressing up the sport as ‘making markets efficient, consistent, and reliable’ and other common tropes such as ‘providing liquidity’ or reducing overall market vol.

It’s not to say that some of these things aren’t true, but it is definitely a pastiche of the truth in the way that people understand it. Also, for all the good that market makers do, order book depth is not one of them, so when markets really need liquidity, nobody is willing to bear the risk. Ultimately, I’m quite sympathetic to the industry, as they have to make honest work palatable for a mainstream audience. Individuals may also have to delude themselves at times in order to incentivise themselves to work, either by morally justifying the means, or having morally justifiable ends.

But please, can we stop with the posturing about our love of tackling complex challenges, helping clients navigate uncertainty, or being in love with stochastic calculus. Because wanting to increase the standard of welfare for ourselves and those we love, or directing capital to causes and interests that we love, should be the only explanation we need, and it is not one that needs much further warranting.