By John Cairns

In the global markets where investors stash their savings a few things can be guaranteed – like uncertainty, volatility and a new crisis always on the horizon, says author Martin Baker, who titled his successful first novel Meltdown (2008, Macmillan, London, 390 pages).

Despite safeguards and regulations, trading in the likes of stocks, commodities or currencies is imperfect and subject to large-scale manipulation, Martin said on a recent visit to Hong Kong.

“I believe there’s no such thing as a level playing field. Fundamentally, all markets are rigged. There’s a gentle incline. Why is it that shares move up before a bid is announced? It’s because someone, somewhere bought on inside knowledge, no matter what the regulators say.”

But Martin sees the international markets, including their main branches in New York, London and Toyko, as necessary and intensely interesting. “The market mechanism is like what Winston Churchill said about democracy. It’s the worst possible system, except for everything else yet tried.

“There’s a big market crisis, a meltdown, every three years or so,” Martin said. “We get more used to it.” Just weeks ago, the French bank Societe Generale suffered a multi-billion-dollar loss blamed on Jerome Kerviel, a “rogue trader”.

“How could my novel foreshadow the Soc Gen fiasco so accurately?” Martin marvels. “In an earlier version, I actually had my hero operating an investment vehicle called Delta Quadrant. In real life, Kerviel’s investment vehicle was called Delta One.

“In human and emotional terms, Meltdown explains the strangeness of markets and how such a giant cock-up, a multi-billion-dollar hole below the waterline in a huge bank, can occur. What happens in the neon-covered ivory towers, the skyscrapers, the inner sanctums that rule so much of the world economy, has to be a legitimate subject for fiction.

“Actually, it’s all about office politics and the star system by which no one questions traders if profits keep coming from a black box. It’s about partial truths – everyone gets most of the story, but with different bits missing. It’s about knowing how to work the IT system. It’s about colluding with people outside and always shifting things so that when people open a door, they see a bouquet of flowers, as it were, but behind the scenes a Marx brother runs with the flowers between doors. It’s always the same bouquet.

“Market capitalism may have a core element of lunacy, but it also corresponds to the folly of humans, our vanity, frailty, greatness and strength. So I’m all for it, especially as an observer. Personally, I’d be eaten alive as a trader, but I find it very exciting. One of my missions is to explain, enthuse and dare to say this stuff is interesting.”

A British journalist, Martin, age 49, spent more than a decade researching, writing and rewriting Meltdown and then guiding it into print. “I’ve been 15 years turning myself into an overnight success,” he said.

Then he went to Hollywood and lobbied to turn the novel into a movie. “We’re about to do a deal,” he said. “We’re setting up a partnership with a major independent producer.”

Cameras may point at actors next year. “I don’t want to write the screenplay because I’m too busy writing books,” Martin said. “My only vanity is that, like Alfred Hitchcock, I’d like to be an extra in the film and have my few seconds of screen time.”

Samuel Spendlove, the fictional hero of Meltdown, accepts a newspaper assignment to work with and spy on a notorious market manipulator at Ropner Bank in Paris. One of his colleagues vanishes, and market chaos erupts. “When starting the story, I thought that something similar had happened in the French banking system and been covered up,” Martin said.

Meltdown moves at a fast pace. “Ideally, readers should get a great book and learn interesting things too,” Martin said. “I want to sweep them along and dare to entertain. If a book isn’t entertaining, it’s like inviting someone to dinner and then refusing to talk to them. It’s rude.”

Version Thirteen, another Spendlove novel, should appear within months. “That one’s about how Russia emerges from gangster capitalism and legitimizes,” Martin said. “It has oil, arms and a casino economy. The anti-heroine is Russia’s only female oligarch, the Black Widow. Russia has become a Petri dish for modern capitalism. It’s a fascinating society with amazing people on an accelerated learning curve. The story cracks along, like Meltdown does.”

Martin’s researching a third book, taking his hero to Shanghai. “That’s an extraordinary place. The story’s about totalitarian capitalism. How does political control engage with the strong sense of self among increasingly wealthy people? There are financial and military aspects and big collisions of ideas.”

In 1996, Martin published A Fool and His Money, a collection of satirical essays. Earlier, he studied law. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Independent on Sunday.

Martin’s wife, Nicola Horlick, the CEO of Bramdean Asset Management, ranks among Britain’s leading businesswomen, but he denies using her as a basis for fictional characters. Instead, “she’s a fantastic technical story editor. I absolutely defer to her on detail and technicalities.”

“When Nicola and I initially got together, there was deep suspicion and hostility towards me,” Martin said. “Business people would ask Nicola, ‘A journalist? What’re you thinking?’ I’m the observer, and business people are the observed.”

Martin and Nicola have eight children (some Martin’s step-children) aged eight to 19. “Having Sunday lunch can be the logistical equivalent of moving the Sixth Army across the Rhine,” he said.

Looking ahead, Martin may craft many more novels. “I hope so,” he said. “Fiction’s satisfying because you can tell emotional truths in ways that you can’t with journalism. In the creative space of a novel, you really explain how you see things working in the real world. If you do it vividly enough, it gets really interesting.”

For more information: www.martinfdbaker.com


In bull markets or bearish ones,
manipulation may be huge, Martin says.

ARCHIVES