Dan Davies

Dan Davies is an economist who brings clarity and wit to the messy realities of financial systems, decision-making, and modern power. A veteran of the Bank of England’s crisis-era backrooms, Davies came of age as an economist attending closed-door meetings during the Mexico bailout and LTCM rescue. But it was his post-crisis vantage point of watching the financial system disintegrate from inside Credit Suisse in 2007 that cemented his reputation as one of the rare analysts who could explain financial dysfunction with precision and personality. His ten-year run in the minor leagues of British stockbroking earned him a cult following as an equity analyst who could make Basel III funny, fraud legible, and regulation feel like real-time anthropology.

Davies is the author of Lying for Money, a definitive and darkly funny study of commercial fraud but it is The Unaccountability Machine that marks his most ambitious intervention to date. Longlisted for the Financial Times Book of the Year, the seminal piece is a meta-inquiry into the systems that make fraud, failure, and farce possible in the first place. Dan Davies argues that the most dangerous institutions aren’t those that are badly run, but those that are run by no one at all.

What unites his work is quiet radicalism. A refusal to accept that complexity must mean inevitability, or that dysfunction is a necessary cost of modernity. To Davies, the future of economics lies in models that can help us see the machines we’ve built, the madness they produce, and how to make them sane again.

Dan Davies is Managing Director at Frontline Analysts and the voice behind Back of Mind. A companion piece to The Unaccountability Machine where he explores the quieter and stickier ideas that shape how we understand the systems around us. Like the book, the newsletter is rooted in cybernetics, the study of how systems are controlled, and looks at how organisations, governments, and markets make decisions (or avoid them entirely).