The Days are Just Packed

I've noticed that whenever I'm on campus lately I've been walking a lot faster. There's too much to do, and it's going to be this way for a while.

I've been reading Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money. Pretty interesting, informative read, aside from this:

"So how did this Mr. Bond(speaking about the bond market) become so much more powerful than the Mr. Bond created by Ian Fleming? Why, indeed, do both kinds of bond have a license to kill?"

Are you kidding me? What a ridiculous sentence, and coming from a well respected Harvard economics professor. If it was meant to be funny, it's completely out of line with the tone of the book, and if it was meant seriously, Niall Ferguson needs to stick his head in a bucket of cold water.

I think it was serious, and it really speaks to this kind of mass delusion I've observed among some economists when they're talking about the financial markets. Even though this book is written in the context of providing some understanding to the meteoric rise of the financial markets and it's current downfall, at times, Ferguson writes about economics with this almost indecent tone of reverence. He compares the ascent of money to the ascent of man, comparing Planet Finance to Planet Earth, gleefully citing statics that express how dominant money is in our lives. Perhaps that's the point of his book - money is now more important to our lives than ever before, but in Ferguson's and other economists' world, it's as if wealth has replaced normal human metrics of a man's worth like integrity, honesty, a sense of justice. Simply amass a pile of money and you can skip right over all of that petty moralizing bullshit.

I think this is a huge problem. Humongous sums of money confer godlike power onto their holders. These days, anything is possible if you have enough money - buy, sell, destroy a country, a person, a species, a town. This kind of power understandable distorts your self perception.

So the wealthy are deluded by their wealth. You can see this happening - Auto industry CEO's flying to Washington on private jets after driving their businesses into the ground to ask for money, John Thain shits on a 35000 dollar toilet, and bankers, so talented at finance, keep luxury cruises on a budget that they beg the government to balance. Their wealth acts as a shining shield of self confirmation - if they could amass so much value, they must have done something to be worthy of it. Their shit smells like roses, their mistakes are merely preludes to success, their inordinate wealth is their inordinate self-worth. You can do no wrong so long as you can point to that your giant pile of money.

I don't think you can make the argument that they deserve it. Financial firms didn't make all that money by working inordinately hard, being more innovative, smarter, or creative. If you're digging a hole and and discover an oil well, do you deserve the millions that you make? likewise, If you're a bond trader and you can convince someone that trusts you to buy a bond that has been carelessly rated triple a by a regulatory agency at a price higher than you bought it for, do you deserve the millions you make? What exactly are you being rewarded for? Are you 'creating' wealth?

I need to read more about monetary policy and banks, maybe this opinion will be revised.