Comment by exclusiv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exclusiv | Hacker News Reader

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I like some of this stuff, but he's part of the system and you can tell from his writing. The system that gets off on having information disparity between the powers and the people.

Very little value added at all but much extracted.

Bloomberg terminal subscriptions with $20k+/year licenses as one small example. The equivalent of an Oracle to many on here and the licensing most despise but for some reason nobody questions this guy? Or Bloomberg/CNBC/similiar in general? Or anyone peddling any financial stuff? Would we just trust a big co enterprise salesperson that's been around the block? No we wouldn't.

Anyway, he said of Archegos before:

"But one thing I want to say about the banks is that if you were one of Hwang’s prime brokers and you had perfect information — about how big he was and how concentrated, about how many banks were financing him, about his effect on stock prices, about Viacom’s stock offering, etc. — you might still rationally do this trade, if you were confident you could get out first."

You'd have to be part of the system to make a statement like that.

Banks take deposits and list them as assets. And then get risky with that money they have relatively low cash reserves for. And when they screw up, it costs them less than what they gained. It's ridiculous.

The financial engineers' version of rational is reckless.

> Banks take deposits and list them as assets.

On the bank's balance sheet, a deposit is a liability. In fact, it's a short-term liability, since most deposits can be withdrawn on short notice. A bank's central business is to borrow short (from depositors) and lend long (to individuals and businesses).

It's also an asset which earns them interest. Or in the case of the article and the Credit Suisse/Archegos situation, an asset they leverage to make really dumb moves with (and possibly fraud) to screw over pension funds and others in the process of their greed.

> most deposits can be withdrawn on short notice.

Except for the fact that person A deposits $X in the bank and person B has $X withdrawn, nothing physical happens. It's just an offset on the books and enables them to keep very low cash reserves.

"As of March 2020, the minimum reserve requirement for all deposit institutions was abolished, or more technically, fixed to zero percent of eligible deposits. The Board previously mandated a zero reserve requirement for banks with eligible deposits up to $16 million, 3% for banks up to $122.3 million, and 10% thereafter. The removal of reserve requirements followed the Federal Reserve's shift to an "ample-reserves" system, in which the Federal Reserve Banks pay member banks interest on reserves that they keep in excess of the required amount." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement

He writes like that because he assumes you are an adult who can make your own judgements about the ethical decision to "try to get out first."

I'm not sure how you conclude that. And you're inserting "ethics" into a bank's business decision?

He writes like that because he's part of the system. It's so entrenched it's all self preservation and tons of money influencing the media to say what they want them to say. But it's hard to parse because the experts that are feeding seemingly sensible info are former Goldman Sachs or similar.

Jim Cramer bragged about how he manipulated stock prices at a hedge fund and if he was short you can't "foment", on your own, an impression that a stock is down but you do it anyway because "the SEC doesn't understand it". You trick the "moron longs" and "spread a rumor on Apple because the writers want that story and Apple isn't going to comment on it". "this is what's really going on in the market that you really don't see". "what's important when you're in that hedge fund is to not do anything remotely truthful because the truth is so against your view that it's important to create a new truth". It's absurd. [1] And this guy is still on a major network with major influence.

If you are looking at that Archegos situation objectively, you would say clearly - that's fucked up for them to do with other people's money. Not Levine.

Yet when "normal" people risk their own money on something he disagrees with, he's writing a big diatribe about how ridiculous it is. When banks play with their money, nothing to see here people. They might have been doing a rational move.

Or in this article "yes credit suisse did two bad things" and "Still it is strange to characterize this as primarily securities fraud against the shareholders, to think that the problem here was lying."

Just characterize it as securities fraud secondarily I guess Matt?

I like his insight into the system but he does way too much early PR damage control and apologies for the embedded players and not enough objective commentary. But again, he writes for Bloomberg and is former Goldman Sachs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6csjSGyEbUs

> he's part of the system and you can tell from his writing

He literally worked at Goldman Sachs, and he mentions this frequently, especially when poking fun at his former employers.

Yes I know he worked there in the past. But you could be a former Facebook employee and still be an apologist for any privacy concerns raised against tech. As I've stated in some comments, he tends to downplay wrongdoings by the players that are currently in the system.

Wow, what a weird tangent that has nothing to do with this thread.

Except for the fact that I commented on the author of the article. And also the source in Bloomberg and the information disparity they benefit from financially. And also I commented on the author's previous ridiculous statement about Archegos which is in the article as well...

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