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Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional business and retail lending activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets. This was one aspect of modern financial liberalisation that had dire consequences.
Accounting does not make corporate earnings or balance sheets more volatile. Accounting just increases the transparency of volatility in earnings.
Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath the Earth's crust, in pure salt crystals, and inside the rocks of the dry valleys of Antarctica.
The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.
It sounds extraordinary but it's a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.
I have had every hair color. I joke with my hair colorist. She keeps sheets of paper on every hair color that I've had, so she has records of it all. She's done my hair since I was 15, and I guess I have a thick folder going because I've had so many different hair colors.
The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.
I try to apply the organic concept to my clothes and bedding as well. There's nothing like swimming in organic cotton sheets.
I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.
I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God.