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Comment by eine_zwei | Hacker News Reader

Agree with all the praise. However, reading him long enough, I started to get annoyed with the blase approach to the Wall Street(tm) transgressions.

I do not think it is a case of pandering to your audience. The following quote (about his time in Dealbreaker) captures it perfectly:

>Part of the problem was that he couldn’t really access a contempt for Wall Street titans. He was of the place, and he found its workings genuinely interesting.

I am in the industry.

It's a missed opportunity, IMHO. It is easy to dismiss some uniformed politician criticizing your industry norms. Much harder when it's coming from someone who clearly understand what is going on.

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I enjoy his column particularly because he talks about all of this scheming and maneuvering in a straightforward and neutral way.

I can decide for myself if something is immoral or offensive or whatever, I don’t need my news sources to decide that for me.

I also think he approaches this like a lawyer, where what is right and wrong is constantly evolving and people are always testing the limits of it. People will keep on finding surprising ways to try beat the system, the system will always try new ways to prevent it but those ways will have unintended consequences. I think this has to be interesting to you if you want to have a good grasp of it.

My favorite thing related to this is how it's always hard to know who exactly is "wrong" without reading the whole thing most times.

The reality is that media helps define what is normative and what is not. Describing bad behaviour and abuse of the law, without calling it out as bad, helps normalize it.

Matt Levine's columns often goes one step beyond the "neutral way". They often describe them as cool ingenious schemes done by smart people.

I guess it's hard to infer tone in a newsletter, I always saw his descriptions as a use of understatement to really draw out how evil some of these things were or in other cases to pass over the small time crook and focus on the systemic issues.

I can see it the other way too though, now that you mention it.

You realize there's a difference between "the media does (attempt to) define norms" and "the media should define norms", right?

They are cool ingenious schemes done by smart people — who sometimes happen to be criminals.

That's why people watch heist movies and play GTA, too.

Not sure Matt Levine has the power to change what is perceived as cool by western culture.

When he talks about the bankruptcy/CDS/default shennanigans (eg Hedge fund offers bailout to avoid default in exchange for ophaning credit etc), he does not take a stance on right and wrong.

Why? Both sides of the game are Informed. This isn't screwing over the dentist, it is fund A outthinking funds B and C. Is it a social good? Don't know, nor does he (seemingly). So why bother pretending

On the other hand, is there a lack of writing about finance with lots of contempt and anger? Matt Taibbi may not be an insider in the way that Levine is but he (and others) often manage to be fairly well informed and they are certainly contemptuous and angry.

I also wonder if to understand is not, in some inevitable sense, to forgive? Is it really possible to fully understand on an emotional level how a quant trader feels when they spot an arbitrage opportunity and be angry about it?

Matt Taibbi is not at the same level as Matt Levine. He is writer first, analyst second.

Taibbi also has zero sense of humour - like when he reported that a trader was exchanging insider LIBOR tips for day-old sushi not realising it was obviously meant in jest:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/everythi...

>Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it’s hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.

"...an image that captures..."

I think it's you who misread Taibi's meaning rather than him having missed something there, fwiw.

Considering it never happened I think it's a pretty poor fit for an image that captures, so either way I'm not very impressed.

It is exactly what happened and is literally in the direct quote. The reader is assumed to be sufficiently intelligent to work out that day-old sushi was not actually exchanged in a quid-pro-quo. It is darkly comic but surely isn't funny. The morally and ethically wanton ridculousness of it is what frames the image according to Taibi in his writing. He's deeply aware of what is going on there, suggesing he isn't is really missing the point totally.

Taibi does not write with a style I particularly like. Taibi's politics are not my own. What he does is write masssive stories that are being ignored elsewhere. Wall street criminality. Russia-conspiracy theories discrediting media. Defence funding and contracting. There is always a campaign to discredit him becuase he upsets wealthy, corrupt assholes by shining a light on their behaviour. I wish journalists whose style I cared for more did that. I wish jouranlists whose politics are closer to my own did that. Taibi does do it and that alone is deeply, deeply impressive. We need a lot more of that with many different perspectives and different writing styles. I'll happily start with Taibi because he's doing it and support him totally that he actually does it.

I'm sticking up for Taibi even though I dislike his style and his politics because he's a journalist practisising journalism and not a cheerleader who is playing an acting role of a journalist on tv. Journalism is to be encouraged. Unfair criticisms of journalism should be called out. Yours is such, be that intentionally or not.

It's a very finance culture approach, though, where the bounds of what's in and out are tested constantly by what (knowledgeable, ideally) participants, compliance departments, and regulators are willing to tolerate. Many banks were highly criticized after the financial crisis for selling "knowingly toxic" CDO/CLOs but on the other side of the trade were highly sophisticated buyers who wanted those securities.

They hacked the ratings system. There were pension funds who saw AAA rated garbage with apparently high returns and thought "woohoo!"

Theres a really book called traders, guns and money that goes into the details on this.

When the government started going after the ratings companies they downgraded US bonds (as if the US would ever default...)

I think it's a resignation to cynicism. It's hard to be angry 24/7. I used to work in a "___-tech" area that I dislike from a moral perspective now, and it's not healthy for anyone, let alone yourself, to be openly angry about it all the time. So, instead, I follow the industry a bit and am mostly resigned to the inevitability of more disappointing news.

One of my favorite pieces of his writing was the "Programming Note" he wrote in June of this year, during/after the protests around George Floyd's death, and the Trump photo op in Lafayette Square. It has his usual insight into what really are the rules behind the rules, and what are the true incentives beneath the surface. It has some of that same sense of resignation, and even goes a bit into where that comes from.

---

Programming note

I don’t know. Mostly I am dazed and heartbroken all the time, and it seems trivial and disrespectful to write a column about finance these days. But this is a financial newsletter, and like a lot of my readers I like having a mostly safe space for finance, so here we are.

A theme of this column over the past few years has been legal realism, the idea that “law,” really, is just what officials do about disputes. Rules, the written laws, the constitution, are all “law” only insofar as they predict or explain the actions of public officials, or persuade those officials to do things. “That is all their importance, except as pretty playthings,” as the great legal realist Karl Llewellyn put it. If this column sometimes seems cynical, it is mostly Karl Llewellyn’s fault.

It seems to me that one central argument of the past few days has been about whether people with power should have to follow rules at all. America has good rules about freedom of speech and assembly and religion; it has a president who violently dispersed a peaceful protest and drove priests from their church so that he could pose for photographs outside of it. America has good rules against unreasonable searches and seizures, about the right to a trial by jury and due process of law; it has a long history of police killing black people with impunity.

A message of the protests is that the police should have to follow the same rules as everybody else, that when they break the law they should face consequences. A message of the response to the protests is: No, they shouldn’t. Is the law what it says? Or is it the raw fact of what the people with the guns and the tear gas do? I think I know the answer and it makes me sad.

He's brilliant, and he explains complex concepts really well.

I can't fault him for being a bit "over-neutral", for lack of a better way to put it. It's how economists are trained to express themselves and, more importantly, I don't think he'd ever get a fawning piece written about him by the fNYT if he took the approach of, say, a certain other gifted writer whose name cannot be spoken here.

I actually find his approach illustrative - even those in the business not inclined to completely disregard the intent behind any rules think of the whole enterprise as a great game divided into competitors and civilians, who are mostly just collateral damage in these contests. There is also a general acceptance of the idea that anything not forbidden is compulsory - if someone gets around the rules to do something others outside the game might consider unethical, then that is the fault of the rulemakers for not being clever enough to write the rules well enough, and in fact it is incumbent upon the players to expose such loopholes. Because leaving money on the table is really the only sin on Wall Street.

As a civilian it's important to understand this mindset when dealing with the financial industry at any level because if you don't, you're going to be on the short end of the things Matt writes about.

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