It was a sunny afternoon and we were having lunch in one of the oldest restaurants in Brussels Villa Loraine. We were all a bit drowsy from the champagne aperitif in the sumptuous bar with English letter sofa's and then the combination of great wines that accompanied the business menu. Nobody felt like going back to work and even less going home.

The guy in front of me was one of the chosen kids that went to great business schools and then became a banker in the most prestigious London banks before he headed his own division at an American investment bank. And suddenly, without anyone asking, he told us the essence of twenty years in the trade. He was able to formulate it in one sentence. It was so clear, so simple, so liberating that nobody would believe it. He said: “Capital is an Anglo-Saxon Conspiracy.”

He was right but it had taken him twenty years to come to that level of teaching in that economy of language. I wrote it down. It was one of the lessons I had learned not of my own doing but I had adopted it from him. It had saved me twenty years of experience. From then onwards every time I came across a lesson learned I jotted it down. That was the beginning of this book.