As an academician with a long scholarly record, and a businessman with many successes and failures, I have always believed that finance was the single most powerful locomotive of economic prosperity and social progress. The industry was already properly structured but it could be even better if only public authorities kept their hands off the profession. I loved mathematical finance and enjoyed teaching it to others – with unquestioned confidence in its benefits for society.

This was all until the year 2008, when the greatest financial crisis of all times shocked the world and also when, as an irony of fate, I was appointed to chair the securities regulator of my country. Most of my tenure of office was in highly hectic meetings of international organizations, basically discussing what was wrong with finance. In time, most of my prior beliefs about the wisdom of finance started to fade away. I realized that the global financial system was fundamentally flawed and finance, in its current state, had become more harmful than useful for society. Today, I feel the agony of seeing that not much has changed ten years after the global crisis. And the call of duty was to write this short book to provoke wiser people to think about how we can fix finance.

Many people deserve my sincere thanks for their help and support. Serhat Çevikel and Ceyhun Elgin of Boğaziçi University corrected many errors in earlier versions of the book. Serdar Çelik of the OECD and Tim Reid of Deutsche Bank provided valuable data. Paul Stevens, Caroline Astley-Brown and Ruth Wallace of Bristol University Press were graciously supportive through the whole process. Anonymous reviewers’ comments were much improving. I am thankful to the Turkish government for tasking me with regulating financial markets in the midst of a global crisis – a task which turned out to be the school of a lifetime. Last but not least, I thank my wife and daughters for their patience and support. They did not read a single page of the book but they loved the pink cover, maybe signalling that it is time to put some pink into colorless finance.