An interesting article by Elizabeth Day over in The Observer today discusses the way that, in the UK at least,  financial journalism has become cool; and how journalists such as Robert Peston, Gillian Tett, Stephanie Flanders, Paul Mason, Laura Kuenssberg and Faisal Islam have become the modern arbiters of the often arcane and esoteric world of finance.

I can certainly testify to the general publics' increasing attention to finance and economics since the crisis. When MoneyScience first launched in 2004, quantitative finance was, at best, a burgeoning academic field, but the activities of practical 'quants', received very little attention indeed. With the financial crisis, that changed dramatically, and almost overnight, what had been a niche, suddenly came into the spotlight.

Gratifyingly, MoneyScience did start to attract more traffic, and indeed the worse the news in the economy got, the more things improved, but crucially it was the business and practice of finance which started to come under a healthy (in my view) degree of scrutiny.

Last year, there was an unexpected knock on the front door of Robert Peston's home in Muswell Hill, north London. When he answered, Peston, who has been the BBC's business editor since 2005, was confronted by a reporter from a local news agency.

"He asked me a question about whether I dyed my hair," Peston recalls. "Apparently there was some Facebook group claiming that I did. This is the sort of weird thing that happens now but I can't say I object."

Over the last four years, since the global financial crisis was triggered by the bursting of the US housing bubble and the domino-like fall of a series of over-leveraged, under-regulated banks, something curious has happened to business coverage. Where once it was the preserve of financial policy wonks and secretive, high-powered bankers who liked to discuss credit default swaps over breakfast, now it has emerged, blinking, into the mainstream. Reporters like Peston, who had previously resigned themselves to being "in a bit of a ghetto" (his words) are now being recognised in the street and door-stepped by other journalists concerned about the state of their follicular health.

We are, it seems, a nation now obsessed by business and economics.

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