There's no triple in this Bottom Line

Listening to the first edition of the new series of the Bottom Line on podcast this morning, and my hackles rapidly got raised (not what you want on a Monday morning). I like the Bottom Line a lot: simple format (3/4 CEOs, Evan Davis asks them questions), and useful insight. This week, they had on both a hedge fund manager and the CEO of CafeDirect (Anne MacCaig), and, needless to say, much of the discussion was about the current financial crisis.

If you want a concrete example of why we're in the current mess we're in, I'd advise you to download the episode and listen to Hugh Hendry, the fund manager in question, who puts on a quite extraordinary display of immodesty, smugness and self-satisfaction. I can only assume they invited him on to wind everyone up, and provoke a response....in which case, they've succeeded here.

So, why am I so "Disgusted of Bethnal Green" about it? Well, firstly, he criticises the banks for leveraging and irresponsibility, before revealing that his hedge fund is, er, leveraged (to a degree he can't admit) and that they indulge in consistent, and some would say irresponsible, short-selling (which played a significant part in bringing those banks to their knees). Secondly, he calls himself the 'guard dog' of capitalism, before mixing metaphor midstream to describe himself as a 'sharp pencil' jabbing at the spine of businesses. Hedge fund managers as guard dogs? Warning and protecting? Er...ok. Looking at the current scene, one would suggest they haven't done a great job as a guard dog, and have ripped the spine out of several businesses, rather than jabbing at it.

Finally, and most unbelievably, he then attacks the business model of CafeDirect, which is, by all accounts, a sustainable, fair, transparent, honest, ethically-run organisation (Anne MacCaig gets a good plug for Triodos in there). There's no sense that this may be more sustainable (and profitable) because it invests in its producers and provides what its customers are looking for. Or that, gasp, greed is not good. How depressing to hear someone at the heart of a collapsing financial services system to have no sense of what real people are feeling, or any sense of how things ought to change. Quite how, in the midst of a crisis/crunch that has been largely caused by the financial services, this programme ends up with a hedge fund manager giving a fair trade coffee organisation a hard time over their business model, is utterly beyond me. (And Davis does little to turn this around; kudos to the man from Waitrose for doing so).

I'm not absolving the banks from blame, or saying that this is representative of all hedge fund managers, or pretending that CafeDirect is perfect in every way. But this broadcast should be a wake-up call to those saying that the current climate could be social enterprise's greatest opportunity / a chance for a fairer business system. On this evidence, there's a remarkably long way to go for that to even be on the horizon.

Comments

[Rob Greenland]

Good post Nick. I half heard the episode and will have a proper listen later this week. In my half-listening I too could hardly believe what I was hearing. His critique of the unsustainability of the fairtrade premium betrayed a complete lack of knowledge of anything beyond his own unsustainable business model.

Rob