An Introduction to Banking, 2nd Edition

PREFACE

Who among the world's population of authors would not love to write a timeless work? Ideally, a timeless work of fiction, but failing that, something factual that remains the undisputed benchmark for its subject. Somewhat paradoxically, I hold that the latter is actually harder to accomplish. Please don't get me wrong, only a very small minority of us (of which I am not one) have it in them to produce Hamlet, or Dune, or The Iliad, or The Assistant, or Crime and Punishment, or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or The Crab With The Golden Claws, or Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or Peanuts, Featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown, or countless other such immortal works. But once one has produced classic art, it lives forever. There is no need ever to update or modify it.

Practitioner textbooks, on the other hand, are rarely timeless. In almost every field of learning, society develops and adds to its knowledge base, such that a work of non‐fiction rapidly becomes out of date. To maintain currency requires constant updates and further editions, which means more work. An author ambitious of producing a literary masterpiece should avoid the factual learning genre.

But there is an apparent paradox when it comes to works of fact concerning banking: in theory, unlike in so many commercial disciplines, the main principles have not changed since the first modern banks came into being in the fifteenth century. Much of what held good for banks in 1808 and 1908 would have remained fine for ...