Why aren't there any TV shows about bankers? There are plenty of TV shows about lawyers and doctors and even politicians.

 

Even people with pointless careers like pretending to speak to the dead, or having their photographs taken, get their own programmes. How could such an important profession as banking have been overlooked?

 

Bankers control world economies, they get hugely rich inventing esoteric financial products that no one understands, and plenty of them get busted for faking profits, stock-market manipulation or destroying the US housing industry. One was even clubbed to death by his wife just down the road from me here in Hong Kong. Surely this is a profession worthy of a show.

Could the absence of bankers on TV be because banking is so difficult to explain? Some professions are simple to describe. For example, mechanics fix cars, pilots fly planes, and lawyers suck the life out of unsuspecting passers-by. But bankers do incomprehensible things like making a margin on interest income over cost of funds, packaging companies for listing on stock markets and inventing weird products like credit default swaps.

It does sound like it might be too complicated for TV. But complexity cannot matter that much, otherwise there wouldn't be so many programmes about police looking into microscopes.

So what would it look like, a TV show about banking? What do bankers do all day? Well, one thing they spend a lot of time on is lending money. The programme could involve one banker working at a branch office receiving a deposit from someone like you or me. Then some other banker, most likely in a different office, probably in a different country, takes this money and lends it to someone who wants to buy a house, build a power plant or leverage their hedge fund portfolio. Whoever borrows the money pays a lot more interest than what the bank pays the depositor and the bank makes money on the difference. Job done.

It's a fascinatingly simple business model, but would hardly make good TV.

How about the slightly more glamorous business of listing a company on the stock market, an initial public offering?

This is equally uninteresting. An analyst sitting in a cubicle reads all the information the company can provide and then summarises the whole thing in a document called an offering memorandum.

Another analyst takes all of the company's financial information and creates a large Excel spreadsheet that predicts what the company will look like in the future. This takes about two weeks. Then the bank sells shares in the company. The way they do this is that a group of salespeople telephone all the people who bought the last IPO and ask them how much they would like. Not going to keep an audience entertained for 30 minutes, is it?

So if it is not the complexity that is holding back all those banking TV shows, it is more likely that bankers just aren't very interesting.

But TV shows aren't really about the professions that they depict. They are about the lives of the characters, their personal problems and their love lives. In other words, human-interest stories.

There are plenty of these in banking and they're full of irony and surprising twists in plots.

Take this tragic story for example: banker spends his whole career championing free-market capitalism and eventually gets to put his theories into practice on the biggest economy in the world, but only when it is too late and that economy is well and truly obliterated does he realise that he was wrong.

Or how about a banker who spends his whole academic career researching and studying the Great Depression and then one day finally gets his dream job as head of the US Federal Reserve only to be clobbered by Great Depression II.

Perhaps a show about an ex-chief executive of Goldman Sachs, who gets offered the opportunity to give something back to the country that made him incredibly rich, becomes head of the US Treasury, and strangely finds himself in a position to get the government to give money to his old firm and suggest that his old friends limit their salaries.

These stories would write themselves, but there is no need for a sitcom to bring them to our screens. The Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson reality TV show is already on our TVs all day, every day.

And that's the real reason that there are no more bankers on TV - bankers already have their own show. It's called the news, and it's not that great to watch.