Insider histories of Australian banks are rare. It's more than ten years since the only contemporary account by anyone working in the industry, Graham Hand's still relevant
Naked Among Cannibals, was published.
Still Walking cover
So readers may have high hopes for
Still Walking, the just-published memoir of Bill Moss, a long-serving member of the executive committee of Macquarie Bank who was head of that bank's banking and property group for many years.
The major topic of his book, however, is reflections on living life with a disability (in his case, a form of muscular dystrophy) and the entrenched discrimination faced by all disabled people in Australia.
A bright lad raised in a working class suburb of western Sydney in the 1960s, neither he nor his peers ventured into the city's wealthy eastern belt as child, Moss found his way to university courtesy of a teaching scholarship, and avoided the need to pay back the state for its financial aid thanks to the abolition of tuition fees by the Labor government in 1973.
Spared a teaching career, Moss found a job as a graduate trainee with ANZ, where he learned the practices of the long lunch and speed-drinking with workmates in the pub at the end of the day.
After an extended European holiday, Moss returned to Sydney. He found a job with Beneficial Finance and soon found himself becoming state manager and something of an expert in property funding, a niche that became his passion.
Recruited by Hill Samuel around the time it obtained its banking licence in the mid-1980s, Moss claims plenty of credit for originating what later became "the Macquarie model", with the bank earning generous funds' management fees from specialist funds (in the early days merely specialist property trusts), with the bank also a co-investor.
Moss allocates only one chapter to any real survey of his employer of more than 20 years, praising the entrepreneurial approach and risk management culture at Macquarie Bank, but otherwise sheds little light on its affairs.
There are warm reminiscences of the bank's two long-serving CEOs. Of Tony Berg, Moss writes that he had "a very tight management style [that] made many staff uncomfortable and second-guessed every detail."
He also recalls the consistent advice of his namesake, but no relation, Allan Moss, who advised Bill Moss that "everything's on the record".
Moss published his memoir himself. One reason for this may be the liberal defamation of associates and public figures in the text.
One target unable to sue is the late Paul Landa, Labor's minister for planning in New South Wales in the late 1970s.
Moss writes that as a green 24-year-old newly employed at Beneficial Finance he saw developers openly seek loans on the grounds that they needed "to pay money to the Planning Minister to have my plans approved."
Moss offers mixed reviews when it comes to the work of property and other reporters in the media
According to Moss: "The only bribes and/or financial incentives I am aware of involve payments to journalists to write certain stories", though Moss does go on to write that "to avoid bothersome legal action, I will resist the urge to name names."
The property section of the Australian Financial Review, Moss contends, "is not an objective source of news and information; it is in essence a sales document", a rather harsh assessment.
Moss advises readers: "Anything at all you read in the financial media, you must ask yourself the question - what is the vested interest behind this? What is the hidden agenda?"
Bill Moss chose not to write a detailed account of his banking days, a void that, hopefully, another insider will take the trouble to fill.