The sale of Eberstadt to Robert Fleming & Company in the autumn of 1985 represented release from an intractable dilemma. But as a senior partner of Eberstadt I had perforce signed on to a three-year contract with Flemings, although neither my brain nor my heart was in it. Flemings was rigidly structured between an asset management business and an investment banking (still called merchant banking) business. I had spent some fifteen years in the internal migration from investment banker to principal investor within Eberstadt’s loose framework; within Flemings I was placed irrevocably in the agency business of corporate finance. Working my way up to running four marathons per year on a training base of seventy to eighty miles per week provided one outlet during this time. Reading economic theory and engaging with Hy Minsky’s maverick economics provided another.

The near-death experiences of Bethesda Research Laboratories (BRL) and MicroPro prepared my mind to understand in a deeper and more connected way what I had formerly experienced only as anecdotes: access to cash in case of crisis is the only effective hedge against ontological uncertainty. This resonated with what I had learned at Cambridge, at the theoretical level from Keynes and at the level of empirical analysis from the failure of economic policy in the face of financial crisis and economic collapse in 1931. It was also the central message of Minsky’s post-Keynesian work.