This has long been the case, particularly in the world of finance. The trick in my day was to wrap a half-baked idea in just enough bravado that it looked like divine revelation. My old trading desk nemesis Simon Pennyworth understood this better than anyone. During the early 2000s at the height of the dotcom bubble, he cooked up a product called the "Synthetic Growth Basket". Sounded marvellous, but in truth, it was a bundle of failing tech stocks held together by little more than optimism. Pennyworth sold it with such such evangelical flair, you'd have thought it cured gout. I still remember the pitch: "Gentlemen, this isn’t just a product, it’s a vision. A play on infrastructure, innovation and the inexorable rise of the digital self." One hedge fund manager actually wept. Within a few weeks, the basket was down 60%, the digital self had not risen and Pennyworth was nowhere to be seen. I found him two days later at The Globe, sipping a pint of bitter and working on the next pitch. Something about Baltic renewables backed by convertible cocoa bonds. I shook my head and joined him for a drink. "Doesn’t matter what’s in it," he said. "As long as you can tell a story they want to believe." To this day, I’ve never heard a more accurate definition of modern finance.