“A decade ago, I would sometimes lie in bed at night wondering how to make credit derivatives sound exciting. The reason? Back then, I was running the capital markets team for the Financial Times, and was alarmed by the bubble brewing in complex finance.

“I knew, though, that the instruments at the centre of this bubble, such as collateralised debt obligations (or CDOs), sounded like gobbledegook to most people. How, I wondered, could I ever talk about those “geeky” CDOs in a compelling way, so that readers did not just avert their eyes with boredom?”

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Read the full Financial Times article by Gillian Tett here.