Prudence and Ambition, published by Ventura, is two things at once. It is partly the autobiography of Harrison Young, and partly a guidebook for anyone weighing up whether to enter banking as a profession. Young's own working life in banking and finance has been long and notable, and it has taken him across several countries.

Several things make banking a complicated industry. One is the particular place banks occupy in the economy, and that place brings with it a great deal of oversight from governments and regulators. Many bankers complain that they are regulated too heavily. Young's emphasis falls elsewhere: regulation of the right sort matters, he argues, because it produces the conditions in which banks can operate and stay safe. A further source of difficulty is that plenty of what banks do really is complicated, and people who work in banking are not always willing to explain it in terms outsiders can follow. The reviewer's view is that Young clears away the mystique for his readers.

Some of that clearing away is elementary. An investment banking firm, Young points out, is not a bank at all, since a bank is an institution with deposits. Deposits, he adds, look quite different from the two sides of the counter: to the bank they are funding, while to most ordinary people they are an asset. The book also deals with the fine balance of a bank's risk culture, with what the make-up of a board should ideally be, and with ten lessons about risk.

The reviewer was particularly taken with the way the book handles bank capital and the rules that govern it. Banks, Young insists, do not hold capital, although that is how the matter is usually put, even by bank regulators themselves. Capital, on his account, is no more than a figure: the amount remaining once a bank's liabilities are deducted from what its assets are worth. The hope is that the gap between those two values will reassure depositors, along with other creditors, that what they are owed can still be paid, even if the bank's assets unexpectedly turn out to be worth less.

Young's own explanation starts with fees. Bankers at the top of the profession, he writes, are paid what they are paid because their employers can charge the fees they charge. Clients accept those fees because they want the skill and the risk absorption that such firms can supply. Setting pay at the right level, and presenting it so that bankers feel they have been treated fairly, is in his account one of the central difficulties of this business model. A bank has to persuade its most valuable employees that the money is sufficient and, at the same time, persuade its owners, its regulators and the wider public that it is not too much.