The Weaver, the Princess and Goldman Sachs | Hacker News Reader

The Weaver, the Princess and Goldman Sachs

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117 pointsabhinav35 comments

Excellent story.

The world is full of wisdom in the form of myths and stories. Those who know how to learn from this immense repository of human experience are a step ahead of the rest.

Very true - and even more so if you're able to tell these stories in an engaging way to make a point. A good storyteller beats powerpoint any day.

True.

You could do worse than start with aesop:

aesopfables.com

I suspect that the show put on by Congress and Goldman Sachs will end up a wash for the banks and the people. No one will get punished and Congress will say, "See, even the worst of the bunch -- Goldman Sachs -- was within the law, so all the other banks must have been too."

At that point, all cases against the banks will be dropped and we will happily return to the status quo.

A large part of the "show" is to increase public support for financial reform.

Financial 'reform' is the status quo:

> So Congress is in a lather working on a new set of regulations that will prevent problems like this from ever happening again. Really? Ask yourself these questions.

> Did the government sanctioned ratings agencies prevent the meltdown?

> Did the voluminous disclosure laws already on the books prevent the meltdown?

> Did vigilant SEC inspectors prevent the meltdown?

> Did a well financed FDIC prevent the meltdown?

> Did Sarbanes Oxley laws prevent the meltdown?

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2010/04/28/did_you_... (GR BTW)

No matter how hard we try, we simply can't regulate greed (esp. not when the regulators are paid by the banks!). Plus, no one in Congress even understands finance!

The bank bailouts could have come with regulatory measures attached. Was this an intentionally overlooked opportunity?

It seems like there is persuasive evidence that if the Glass Steagall act were NOT repealed, this wouldn't have happened - or not as badly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass–Steagall_Act

A lot of the gutting of regulatory agencies began at the end of Clinton's reign, and Bush hurried it along as much as possible.

The past 12 years have been one long thread of cutting regulatory agencies off at the knees with low funding, figurehead leaders, the repealing of valuable and important regulatory laws.

It looks a lot more like a distraction from how flimsy the reform is.

Interesting. Although how much of this debacle can we attribute to conscious thinking along the lines of "we know this is high risk - high reward stuff, but let us do it to a point till we are too big to fail"?

I am more inclined to think this is a structural phenomenon - something that occurred because the incentives available at each step along the way were structured in a manner that allowed this to snowball.

I think Goldman ignored the counterparty risk they had with AIG because they knew it was systematic, and that the government would bail AIG out and protect them.

I think that the stage for this collapse was set with the collapse of Long Term Capital. That's when all the banks learned that if the bets were big enough, they couldn't lose.

Reserving judgment about the other merits of this article - it's sad to witness again how simplistic, shallow generalizations are the norm when discussing financial matters:

"Another thing which is crucial to the financial services industry is the concept of being too big to fail, which has been put to good use by Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and Goldman Sachs over the past few years in sucking money from American taxpayers."

While this may be true in some sense for Citigroup, applying that to Bear Stearns is dubious, and it's plain wrong for Goldman Sachs. Banks like Goldman and JP Morgan Chase were basically forced to take TARP investments:

http://www.businessinsider.com/uncovered-tarp-docs-reveal-ho...

Several of those banks didn't need the forced investment, didn't want it, and thus strove to repay it as soon as possible:

http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/27/news/economy/tarp_takeback/i...

Goldman in fact repaid the investment in full on June of last year, with a hefty 23% interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#TARP_and_Berkshir...

In other words, Goldman didn't want or make any profit from the TARP investment - the American taxpayer did. GS didn't want that investment at all - it took it to comply with the wishes and policy of the American administration.

The current Abacus scandal is occurring not because, but despite the fact that GS collaborated with the administration and took the TARP investment. In fact, this scandal is mostly about how GS foresaw the collapse of the housing bubble, and set up positions to profit from it - thus absolving itself from any need for taxpayer assistance.

If anything, the American administration and public opinion seem more forgiving toward institutions that played the "too big to fail" card, taking too much risk and heavy loses as a consequence. Those institutions were bailed out, and are currently seeing nothing like the penalties and negative attention that GS is suffering. If the SEC's portrayal of the Abacus deal is accurate, GS should be punished - but the "too big to fail" approach is vastly more dangerous and damaging.

Either way, the discussion isn't served by over-generalizations and lumping everything together.

Goldman received over $12 billion directly from the AIG bailout. Perhaps it could have survived without TARP, but almost certainly not without both TARP and the AIG bailout.

Would Goldman Sachs have crumbled if AIG were allowed to default? The company claims it was properly hedged, but it stretches credibility to believe this given (1) its massive exposure to AIG and (2) the state of the financial markets at the time.

This is valid point, but its implications are limited: you're basically saying that if AIG collapsed, it would lead to further collapses (due to "the state of the financial markets at the time") and that could very well lead to GS suffering as well.

This is true, not just for GS, but for almost any other financial firm and bank in the United States. In that sense, we all, including end consumers, enjoyed the benefits of TARP bailouts - assuming that without them and policies related to them, the entire financial system would collapse and drop the US to something like the great depression or worse.

Those closest to the bailouts got the most milk in their pails. Maybe the consumers got a dribble, but that doesn't disqualify criticism of those who got a whole bucket, especially if they stole the cow to begin with.

GS practically set up AIG to collapse. You might say that's just business, but you have got to be kidding me if you think GS didn't see major ramifications for the economy and predict some kind of governmental assistance. (Normally, if AIG was less entangled with all of the Street and had failed on its own, GS would have have simply lost a bundle on all of its credit default swaps).

No. I'm saying that Goldman received $12 billion from AIG that it wouldn't have received if AIG went under. So wipe that money off Goldman's balance sheets before talking about the health of the business absent TARP, etc. The issue is claiming the company would have done fine without government support and selectively ignoring the fact it had just received a $12 billion dollar bailout in the form of a federal payout of AIG's debt to it.

I wonder if myths like this explain some fraction of a country's economic growth. I suspect that in Europe, this kind of myth would end with the perpetrator being executed for lying and committing heresy; even the Geek myths wouldn't have a god show up to make good on someone else's bogus promises.

Eliezer Yudkowsky also suggested this, at least regarding this African myth: http://robinhanson.typepad.com/overcomingbias/2009/02/an-afr... .

I'm a little unsure about how much is the myths and how much is just survivorship bias. A lot of old gruesome European fairy tales stopped getting told after the rise of liberalism and the free market, so it may just be that the myths reflect the current status of society.

"Bias" is not the only kind of survivorship out there. If these myths keep people alive, the cultures that follow them will stay alive. I suspect that the story mentioned above is part of a larger group of stories with healthier morals. The Grimm's fairy tales you mentioned are similar: some of the older, gruesome ones have morals like "Don't travel alone if you're a young woman, or you'll die," or "Don't convince people they're in danger when they're not, or everyone you love will be killed." Those are healthy myths; a village that believed in them would probably be safer than a village that didn't. And once those myths were no longer necessary, they'd disappear, along with some of the more noxious stories.

Geek myths

The next build will work flawlessly!

What is good collection of these Indian myths? Is there one akin to One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; with more focus on India?

The Panchatantra: a collection of ancient Hindu tales [PDF] http://books.google.com/books?id=jB0YAAAAYAAJ

This one is "Weaver as Vishnu" on page 46.

Note: the HTML version is in Sanskrit, the PDF in English.

Edit: Of course, there are many other works of Indian mythology. The big two being the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which if you consider it a single work, is the longest text ever written. The heart of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita.

I have both, The Panchatantra, and 1001 Arabian Nights. Much (or may be all) of the world's wisdom lies in there. What amazes me is how timeless these nuggets of wisdom are. Great books, both. As a child, these were simply fun, entertaining reads. Now, I find myself going back to understand the lessons in there and just relishing the stories once again.

To your question - the most popular ones are The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. Jataka Tales as someone has mentioned below. Also, Tales of Tenali Rama and Vikram & Betal are good reads too.

While this doesn't fall under the category of myths, perhaps one of the most comprehensive works on finance, war strategies, and international relations (yes, this from ancient India) is Chanakya's Arthashastra. Another book by Chanakya, Nitishastra is about the ideal way of life. Look up Chanakya on Wikipedia.

There are quite few disparate collections of stories and myths from India.

My suggestion would be to start with the Mahabharata, it is a whole literature in itself and is at par with some of the best in the world.

Start with a summarised version(The version by C Rajagopalachari is quite popular) and if you like it you can explore it in-depth with the version by van Buitenen or Kisari Mohan Ganguli.

http://panchatantra.org/

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/jataka.html

Winston Zeddemore from Ghostbusters: "Ray, when someone asks you if you are a god, you say YES!"

awesomely enough, this too is a criminal offence under Section 508

Come to think of it, a lot of India's "God men" could conceivably be prosecuted under that law.

But it's against my programming to impersonate a deity!

The full panchatantra story is here: http://www.gaudiyadiscussions.com/topic_908.html

That's a good tale. I wish there's website with parables and tales like this.

I would like to know what kind of factory the author works in.

As for me, I'd like to know if anyone has ever been convicted in India for impersonating a god.

If it was ever convenient for the government, then it has happened.

There are a couple of automaking units around that area. Since he seems smart, he probably is educated and might be working as an engineer or an accountant in those units.

now if only I was smart enough to figure one out like this.

Is it just me, or is it pretty funny that "pretending to be a God" is illegal under section 508 of the Indian penal code?

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