Patrick Spread studied at Trinity College, Oxford and obtained a doctorate from the London Business School. He worked as a business economist in London before employment overseas in economic management and finance. His first book on support-bargaining and money-bargaining, A Theory of Support and Money Bargaining, was published by Macmillan in 1984. In 2019 Palgrave Macmillan published A Starter on Support-Bargaining and Money-Bargaining in Twenty-Eight Digestible Bites. This study of financial crises is his tenth book on bargaining theory.