Career in finance

twofish-quant

Conversation is pretty much finished. One good/bad thing about politics is that you don't have infinite amounts of time. You had a window of about a year in which you could get any sort of major changes through, and that window is now closed. Anything fundamental that didn't get done before Dodd-Frank got passed is not going to get done.

You have many, many different interest groups, and politics involves the interactions of those interest groups. Anyone that isn't organized in an interest group is simply not going to be able to participate in the discussion at a meaningful level.

You did have real discussion. The other thing is that this isn't a debating society. The discussions that people had in 2009-2010 were intense, angry, brutal, and scary. One reason that people are unlikely to do something like that again is that one major legislative change is going to burn people out, and people don't have the energy for another round of discussions.

A lot of these sorts of discussions tend up when people figure out how to make truces and compromises, and once you have a truce or compromise between deeply entrenched interest groups, no one really is in a mood to break the truces, because most people are too burned out.

And that's the last thing that anyone with any sort of political authority wants. The thing that everyone is afraid are angry mobs demanding to know were their money went.

It's more complicated than that.

Also, it's not an issue with "sovereign nations." One thing that makes this complicated is the nature of Europe. Europe isn't a nation, but it's also not a random collection of independent sovereign nations either. Different people in Europe want Europe to go in different directions, and everyone is going to use the crisis to push their agendas.

One thing that makes this interesting is that right now the UK has it's own seat at the table. If it joins the Euro (which I can't see happening) then UK loses it's own seat and the person that represents UK interests in Basel is likely to be French or German.

The other thing is that you can't talk about "sovereign country A". You have to talk about specific actors (i.e. US, UK, HK, etc.) Also, you have to recognized that some countries just matter more than others. No one cares what Botswana or Jamaica thinks.

I think that's at level of abstraction that isn't useful when dealing with international politics. If you are talking about say stock purchasers, you could model each stock purchaser abstractly. You can't easily do that with countries, although people in international relations theory try.

One problem is the problem of agency. When you say "the US wants something"? What does that mean? One thing that you quickly find out when you get into economics is that on some issues, the divisions are cross national.

chiro

I've followed some of the news on the Euro and the idea of a potential default by Spain, Italy and Portugul is really a sign that this experiment has not worked out the way it should.

The other this is that Greece shouldn't have joined anyway since they got a "US financial institution" to hide the debt through some kind of currency exchange agreement that blew up so when people talk about the recklessness of the Greeks, they fail to account for this fraudulent conversion of debt to a vanishing act.

You've got all these countries going belly up with Germany benefitting from a cheap Euro for exports. Given that it's been around for only 10 years with the rescue fund being pretty much diminished, I can't see why this would continue for too much longer.

As you said, all the countries want to go their own ways which makes me ask the question why they just don't go back to their own currencies?

While Germany benefits though from their own arrangement (good for exports), it really doesn't make sense for Germany at least currently to not support the Euro, but still demand some kind of bailout so that the German banks don't have to take a hit to their balance sheet (as per the situation of the debts of the other countries).

It wouldn't make sense for the UK to join unless they had some kind of power base, since London's main power-base is finance.

Also as you pointed out before, the game is rigged where the least regulated environments will get the transactions, which reminds me of the re-hypothecation laws talked about by a few financial journalists (and the same ones you have talked about in this thread).

Yeah definitely true and I'm glad you pointed it out: it's only considered when someone has something it needs and banana's aren't really crude barrels of oil or US treasuries.

Thanks for the heads up in international theory.

I never wanted to get too abstract in my approach: I wanted to keep it simple as possible because simplicity is easy to understand and it's taken a lot more seriously by most people regardless of where they stand, if they are academic and so on.

The other argument that is spouted is that this is a complex problem, and while this discussion is showing a lot of these complexities, to me complex suggestions and suggestions with bastardized language, waffle jargon, and a lot of redundant metaphors are just going to be ignored and rightly so.

It's not useful talking to politicians, regulators, diplomats, and other people that "get stuff done" in complex terms across the board IMO (regardless of whether they give a stuff or not).

One problem is the problem of agency. When you say "the US wants something"? What does that mean? One thing that you quickly find out when you get into economics is that on some issues, the divisions are cross national.[/QUOTE]

twofish-quant

I think it in fact did work as planned.

One thing that the inventors of the Euro thought to themselves was how do we get the countries united in a way that is pretty much impossible to untie. The solution was to get a single currency. Once you have a single currency then you get yourself in a situation were you have to unite everything else, whether you want to or not.

Because they can't. It's a one way ride.

You have to realize that the job of a politician is to come up with bastardized language and waffle jargon. A lot of getting stuff done in politics is to get people that might in fact hate each other and you on your side. Politicians are experts at playing with language to get this sort of thing done. One other thing is that politicians appeal to the mid-brain. In order to get someone to do something, you can't argue "rationally". At some point you have to trigger some sort of deep emotion that gets them out of their chair. That's at one level of the game.

When you go into writing legislation, then it gets more complicated. Sometimes you want something to be hyper-precise (i.e. two interest groups hate each other negotiate a complex horse trade and want that embedded in the law). Sometimes people want things to be extremely vague (i.e. a situation in which people agree to differ the argument or where the text is going to be interpreted by someone that is considered friendly).

It can be. In any event you have to talk to them in their own language. Or sometimes not. If you just take a politician and put them in an angry crowd screaming at them, they'll take the hint that they have to do something.

chiro

It sounds like enough people were angry and cared to show these guys that they were furious then things would get done, instead of worrying about all the trivial crap that doesn't mean a thing.

I'd be interested if you knew examples of countries where a majority of the citizens had the balls to get angry to actually tell the politicians that they "give a stuff about what they are doing".

My guess is if you have some countries for citizens that just don't want to take an interest in what is happening (I mean what is really happening) then all the lobbying and other actions are going to be done by a small minority.

So when people start to give a crap about what's happening and when you get lots of real screaming and angry people then things will change: probably something which governments want to minimize.

Kind of funny I guess how everybody is just "praying" that nothing blows up while not many people are actually making efforts or thinking about how things can blow up.

Reminds of the scene in Margin Call: one guy was saying to the junior one that everybody else just hopes that everything will work out. If nothing happened, they'd be called pussies and if something happened that they'd be crucified.

The more I think about what's happening, the more I wonder about the veracity of this statement.

StatGuy2000

I have to disagree with you here, because if it was really "impossible" for a member of the EU to leave the euro and resume their own currency, then it would not be possible for Greece to be forced or expelled out of the euro for failing to meet its fiscal commitments as a pre-condition for receiving bail-out money from the other EU nations. But that is precisely what is being discussed as a very real possibility since it is increasingly difficult to foresee Greece being able to follow through with the austerity measures imposed by the other EU nations (the "Grexit" scenario, as described in several articles in the Economist, among other sources).

http://www.economist.com/node/21555567

Of course, such a scenario would have major negative consequences for Greece, at least in the short run, and could have potential consequences for the rest of the Eurozone (as identified in the article). But strictly speaking, leaving the euro can be done.