(no subject)
Oct. 21st, 2018 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDo people know about Matt Levine's newsletter Money Stuff? It is amazing and I've been reading it daily for the last six months or so, and I figure I should make sure other people know about it.
You can subscribe to it here: http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-signup
It's a little hard to explain. I mean, it's easy to explain, but not easy to explain why it's amazing. Basically, Matt Levine is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who got tired of the job and now writes a daily column making fun of the business section of the newspaper. But what makes it so fascinating and enjoyable is the perspective he provides as a former investment banker.
First of all, finance is often incredibly complicated, and Levine's punchlines depend on his audience following the finance, so he explains the news stories he's making fun of, in order that you'll get the joke. Because he's very smart and an insider who knows at a deep level how finance works, he does a very good job of making these complicated things make sense. Money Stuff is incredibly educational about how the detailed mechanics of banking and high finance.
Second, Levine is not one of those former Wall Streeters who concluded that Wall Street was soulless and greed driven and fled in horror to report the tale. Levine liked parts of his job and disliked others, and ultimately concluded it was not for him (he seems to have enjoyed the mathy parts more than the sales parts), but he is of the opinion that our globalized world needs a global finance system: People need to borrow money, companies need to borrow money, people and companies need things to do with their money to protect it from inflation, and so we need a finance system to serve these needs. Sometimes that finance system works well, sometimes it fails us, because it is run by people and people are flawed, and the systems they design are flawed. But when there is a failure in the finance system, even a catastrophic one, Levine is more interested in analyzing it and understanding the mechanics of the failure (and then laughing at it) than he is at condemning the whole capitalist system as a servant of Moloch, and that is a perspective you rarely see, and which I find refreshingly pragmatic and thoughtful.
One of Levine's best gimmicks is a partially feigned aesthetic appreciation for complicated and convoluted trading maneuvers. In Levine's model of the financial world, traders are essentially grownups competing against each other as part of their job to make the most money, and so when party makes a large, tricky bet against another, both sides just doing their job of trying to make as much money for their companies while losing as little money as possible. And so he can celebrate a creative trade the same way one might celebrate a teacher coming up with a new pedagogical method or celebrate an engineer who comes up with a better bridge design.
Anyway, it is often very funny and very educational, and that is a rare combination, and you should check it out.
You can subscribe to it here: http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-signup
It's a little hard to explain. I mean, it's easy to explain, but not easy to explain why it's amazing. Basically, Matt Levine is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who got tired of the job and now writes a daily column making fun of the business section of the newspaper. But what makes it so fascinating and enjoyable is the perspective he provides as a former investment banker.
First of all, finance is often incredibly complicated, and Levine's punchlines depend on his audience following the finance, so he explains the news stories he's making fun of, in order that you'll get the joke. Because he's very smart and an insider who knows at a deep level how finance works, he does a very good job of making these complicated things make sense. Money Stuff is incredibly educational about how the detailed mechanics of banking and high finance.
Second, Levine is not one of those former Wall Streeters who concluded that Wall Street was soulless and greed driven and fled in horror to report the tale. Levine liked parts of his job and disliked others, and ultimately concluded it was not for him (he seems to have enjoyed the mathy parts more than the sales parts), but he is of the opinion that our globalized world needs a global finance system: People need to borrow money, companies need to borrow money, people and companies need things to do with their money to protect it from inflation, and so we need a finance system to serve these needs. Sometimes that finance system works well, sometimes it fails us, because it is run by people and people are flawed, and the systems they design are flawed. But when there is a failure in the finance system, even a catastrophic one, Levine is more interested in analyzing it and understanding the mechanics of the failure (and then laughing at it) than he is at condemning the whole capitalist system as a servant of Moloch, and that is a perspective you rarely see, and which I find refreshingly pragmatic and thoughtful.
One of Levine's best gimmicks is a partially feigned aesthetic appreciation for complicated and convoluted trading maneuvers. In Levine's model of the financial world, traders are essentially grownups competing against each other as part of their job to make the most money, and so when party makes a large, tricky bet against another, both sides just doing their job of trying to make as much money for their companies while losing as little money as possible. And so he can celebrate a creative trade the same way one might celebrate a teacher coming up with a new pedagogical method or celebrate an engineer who comes up with a better bridge design.
Anyway, it is often very funny and very educational, and that is a rare combination, and you should check it out.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-22 04:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-22 01:00 pm (UTC)Levine on Friday, writing about a weird Youtube video advocating for an activist shareholder's plan to replace the board of Campbell's Soup:
Third Point owns about 7 percent of Campbell; the grandchildren of the company’s founder own about 41 percent, and support the board. (The board has “put the interests of corporate insiders and wealthy heirs ahead of shareholders and employees for too long,” says Third Point’s ad.) With those kinds of numbers Third Point needs every vote it can get, and presumably a hilarious YouTube video will win over more disengaged retail shareholders than a PowerPoint deck filed with the SEC would. But I like to think that this video is not the product of a coldly logical calculation about how to win shareholder votes, but is instead a pure expression of Third Point’s artistic side, an outlet for creativity that they have suppressed for too long. “How can we really drive home our arguments against this entrenched board,” I imagine Loeb asking at an all-hands meeting, and there is a long silence, and then finally an intern pipes up “in song?” Man, corporate finance is the best.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-22 03:53 pm (UTC)Okay, you've convinced me: I just signed up for it.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-23 01:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-23 04:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-23 03:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-26 03:54 pm (UTC)Most of what I know about how markets work comes from many years of reading the Wall Street Journal in detail. A small part comes from popular economic history books read on my own. A smaller part yet comes from high school and incompetently mucking around on the school's Fed Challenge team.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-26 04:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-24 06:57 pm (UTC)You might be interested in a book I just enjoyed, Lying for Money by Dan Davies. It's out in the UK now and my spouse bought a copy from abroad; the US edition comes out next year.