ABSTRACT
Money is becoming less of a mystery to most people. At one time, the worlds of money were often represented through a series of cliches - the roguish, buccaneering financier; the barrow-boy foreign-exchange trader; the reliable but staid bank manager; and so on. But nowadays these representations are changing. The roguish buccaneering financier is being replaced by ... us. l Increasingly, as pensions turn towards defined contribution retirement plans, on the US model, so each person will increasingly be in charge of their own investment strategy. Indeed, increasingly financially literate investors, wired up to telephone databases and internet sites, are already having major effects in the United States (The Economist, 1997). Meanwhile, the barrow-boy foreign-exchange trader is being replaced by ... machines. So-called 'program-trading', involving computer software programmed to buy and sell financial instruments when they reach certain prices, is playing an increasingly important role within some international financial markets. And what of the reliable but staid bank manager? He - and it was a he - is also being replaced. Increasingly, banks are becoming like supermarkets (and, in some cases are supermarkets) selling a set of financial products. And the manager is often just an office manager, or even one of the salesforce (Halford, Savage and Witt, 1997), almost certain to be considered as a 'unit of resource' to be recovered by sales offinancial products, and to be backed up by computer software and training programmes which emphasise personal interaction skills.
