Any other business: A seasonal sermon for the City: give generously to portly gentlemen

A consolation of the financial crisis is that it is producing a bumper crop of fiction, the best of which will be read long after all the hefty works of investigative non-fiction have been forgotten. Last year I praised Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, and my Christmas reading this year will include Justin Cartwright’s Other People’s Money and Robert Harris’s The Fear Index. The ‘silo mentality’ of the hedge-fund manager offers a rich psychological seam, the drama of the trading floor provides all the McGuffins to sell the film rights, and the contrast between the financiers’ lifestyle and that of the people whose livelihoods they damage is the 21st-century zeitgeist captured in a few keystrokes.

But on the wider subject of the role of business in society, the best parable yet written is 168 years old. As I was reminded by a lively local school production of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens managed to encapsulate the whole debate. ‘It’s enough for a man to understand his own business and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly,’ barks silo-mentality prototype Scrooge when the ‘portly gentlemen’ (with whom I always identify strongly) ask him for a donation to provide seasonal cheer for the poor. ‘Business!’ cries Marley’s ghost, wringing its hands in the manner of the late Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, ‘Charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’

A realistic definition of ‘good business’ lies somewhere between those two positions. But still it would be nice on Christmas morning to encounter bankers dancing with the joy of rediscovered fellow-feeling, sending turkeys to their clerks and pressing cheques into the pockets of portly gentlemen.