It is the unspoken rule of giving a careers talk to schoolchildren that the first question you always get asked is, 'how much do you get paid?'.
No matter what you have said before, or how persuasively you have made the case for your industry, you had better be prepared to tell them about your salary.
And so it proved the case the other week when I went in to a local secondary school to speak about journalism to a group of year 10 students, right in the middle of studying for their GCSEs and pondering what next to do with their lives.
For almost an entire hour they sat there staring blankly back at me – no matter how funny or engaging I thought I was being.
That was until I showed them a screenshot of a story we had recently published in The Times. It showed the experiences of a group of 20-somethings who were investing, and almost every single one of them was invested in crypto in some way.
Suddenly the room was full of chatter and questions. Everyone wanted to know about crypto; 'how do you get into it?' and 'how do you make money from it?'.
It is worrying, but is it totally irrational? My colleague Imogen Tew recently argued very persuasively that rather than being utter madness, the pursuit of crypto by 20-somethings was in fact entirely rational.
They are having to watch as house prices continue to race way ahead of them, have been deprived the chance to ever have a defined benefit pension, and have missed out on the FAANG tech boom and the 12-year bull run in markets.
Do we ignore the craze by screaming and shouting that it is wrong, or do we have a responsibility to educate people? They are being told by older investors who have benefitted from all this, and pocketed gains from the crazy valuations of many of these assets, that they should not be similarly trying to chase gains.
It is rather logical, even if you do not believe it is the right thing to do. Sky-high market valuations and low interest rates were always going to lead to investors chasing returns by taking on risk elsewhere – and crypto is the means that younger investors have found to do that.
From the start I have disliked crypto. Initially this was because I did not understand it, then as I tried to educate myself more about it I found myself struggling to believe whether it would ever truly find its purpose as an alternative form of currency.
There is an excellent blog from economists at the Bank of England on this issue, and they come to the same conclusion about 'what exactly is the purpose of crypto?'.
It does not store value, it is not widely accepted and certainly recently seems to have been hijacked by criminals.
This leaves it as a highly volatile unregulated investment, one solely based on market sentiment, which in that respect makes it little different to many other stocks in this meme age.
The question I find myself trying to answer as a newspaper editor is how we should deal with this. Do we ignore the craze by screaming and shouting that it is wrong, or do we have a responsibility to educate people about what exactly crypto is and how to invest safely, if that is what they want to do?
I know one thing: crypto is not going to go away.
Equity scandal
One of the ongoing problems from the global banking crisis has been the creation of mortgage prisoners; the former customers of bust lenders who have found themselves shunted onto hedge funds and private equity who bought these old books of business.
There is no incentive for these businesses to offer these customers cheaper deals.
And so we are starting to see the same problems with equity release. The modern day sale of equity release is robust and heavily regulated, but in the past it was not. And the inability of many borrowers to refinance is becoming highly damaging for the reputation of the industry.
But many of these books of equity release have been sold on to private finance houses who care little for the industry or for the problems of the customer they have inherited.
If equity release wants to avoid another damaging scandal it needs to find an answer to this potentially highly damaging problem, quickly.
Armaments and ESG
Is a tank a weapon or a peace-keeping device? That's a question thrown up from the conflict in Ukraine.
There was a very convincing argument made by an analyst at Morningstar for the inclusion of weapons makers in environmental, social and governance portfolios – and the fact many portfolios do include arms makers.
The distinction is that true ESG will not include controversial weapons, such as chemical weapons and anti-personnel land mines.
Which is interesting, but are not all weapons essentially controversial?
James Coney is money editor of the Times and Sunday Times
@jimconey
