Stuart Kells’ ALICE™ is by turns fascinating, annoying, insightful and baffling. Much of this is inherent in the subject matter – international banking, derivatives trading, backroom stock manipulation and, above all else, the arcane mysteries of international patent law.Yes, the eyes of the uninitiated do glaze over at words such as derivatives, credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations.
It took me a while to work out what Kells’ book was actually about, until it became clear that it had less to do with high-risk banking practices and dodgy wagers for astonishing stakes, than the ownership of ideas. The bizarre machinations of what followed, before the patent was ultimately shot down in flames by the US Supreme Court, who agreed with an international consortium of mega-banks by ruling it to be invalid in 2014 , form the guts of the story.
By the 1980s and into the ’90s, laissez-faire economics had given the banks free rein. These were the days of “letting the market decide”, as though “the market” was some kind of sentient being, not the financial version of a mud-wrestling pit that it turned out to be. You might imagine that the GFC would have given bankers and regulators pause for thought, and maybe it did, for a moment or two.