In any case, writers do not need to understand the motives behind credit default swaps, but the far more comprehensible emotions of euphoria in a boom and panic in a bust. Maybe they pull back because they know so little of commerce. Most are from public- sector families. They spent their lives around academia, first as students and then as creative writing or English Lit. teachers. Whenever I meet them, I glumly think that modern authors are the artistic equivalents of Westminster's political class: narrow professionals with few experiences of life beyond their trade.
Perhaps I am over-complicating and the explanation for the near-obliteration of the themes of wealth and poverty is simpler. Last year's costume drama, Cranford, went out as Northern Rock crashed. Mrs Gaskell had made much of the ruin brought by a run on a northern bank, but the BBC missed the chance to give the classic a contemporary feel. It played down the bank run because filming had stopped months before. Like the politicians, speculators and regulators, its writers didn't know modern audiences would need to worry about depositors panicking, liquidity vanishing and debt deflating.
They know it now.
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