Ex-Barclays VP who completed a PhD in prison: "All my former colleagues ignore" | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Barclays VP who completed a PhD in prison: "All my former colleagues ignore"

efinancialcareers.com

56 pointsxbmcuser35 comments

> If anything, Palombo says it probably makes sense to just do things without any questions. "“I complained a lot at work and I believe this made me a target. The more sensible advice is maybe just to play the game, keep your head down, don’t complain, don’t report your bosses, obey. Those people were all promoted, and of course none were charged in relation to the Libor/Euribor cases. Barclays protected them.”

So that’s his takeaway? Kinda sad but then again who wants to end up in prison for doing what everyone else is doing as well.

As long as we keep bailing out and protecting large financial institutions at the expense of the nations they supposedly serve because "the alternative would be worse" this kind of thing will be encouraged because it's the optimal strategy.

Classic Double Bind. Whole frame has to shift to escape it.

Something like massive cyberattack/bank nationalization/interest bearing CBDCs/all rates set by AI etc.

FYI, a VP title at a financial institution doesn’t compare to a VP at a normal company. Don’t be fooled by the different title structures in banking. Being a VP does not mean someone was an executive or even necessarily in management.

This guy actually literally said that in his trial: https://archive.is/8awTN

Yeah, I always chuckled at that. Where I worked out of college, "Vice President" was kind of the basic individual contributor, not counting interns and assistants and the like. From there it went to Senior VP, then Director, then Managing Director, and then finally the "real" executives, but I forget what their titles were.

Let's see Paul Allen's card: https://youtu.be/E1nSwpxRuJo

In finance, every other person is a VP.

In my former work i was AVP, everyone there more than around 5 years was an AVP.

My job didn't change at all.

To be fair everyone that was VP was managing something.

Broadly it tends to mean team lead.

Not even that

yea, titles are given more to signal naive clients or counterparties "authority", like they are talking to a senior person from the bank.

literally everything in the "west" is fake or fraud

I think a lot about banks and their stranglehold on everything. Crypto was supposed to be somewhat of a cure but now it’s being adopted by them which will enable control. It really feels like there’s no way to avoid or change the system?

Change it to what?

Economies today are incredibly complex, because products and services are complex, laws are complex, and trade is international.

There is a need for people who specialize in risk assessment for loans and investment to separate the wheat from the chaff for new business ideas. It would be very hard I think to recreate some alternative institution that does not by in large recreate the same structure and incentives of modern banking.

Cryptocurrency advocates have multiple times had to learn the same hard lessons as fiat currency users.

Solution will be also complex. (I don't know how) but it can't rely on fully debt related growth. I mean at some point they will pay so much to interest that, first social BS and then entire "economy" will be not sustainable. This is a fact.

The stranglehold of banks comes from the special privileges they get to create credit, get bailed out for investment losses, get more favorable tax rates, and be the instrument of economic manipulation through capital injections. No one would complain if they just assessed risk and invested money in businesses, the problem is the game is completely rigged for them, they cheat and steal, and then get bailed out for their failures.

Something where everyone isn’t such a cheater?

The gatekeepers mostly get to police themselves. If you’re on the inside you can practically get away with financial murder.

The incentives are too perverse. Who wouldn’t skim or manipulate a few million dollars to make their life more comfortable? Only the kind of people who wouldn’t pursue banking in the first place.

interesting, although it is not clear how long he was in prison for.

He was jailed for four years in 2019 and seems to have spent two years in Wandsworth Prison, which is a category B prison.

Since it'd be shocking if he didn't get out as early as sentencing allowed (which is two years and a bit basically) I guess he will perhaps have served some time in an open prison and then been released.

But he may have gone straight to release due to the pandemic.

These people were used as scapegoats for something maybe half the people on certain early morning trains into Cannon St every morning would have known was probably happening.

One day just after Lehman collapsed I got chatting to a very stressed-looking guy on said train back from London, who was drinking wine from a small bottle, and he asked me if I was in finance, I said no. He said "well that's good, because if there's not enough support from the government, almost everyone on this train will lose their job."

He then asked me if I knew what LIBOR was. I did, because I studied economics at school. I explained and he was impressed; he said that outside of London almost nobody had any idea. He said "watch out for it in the news". But I already knew what he meant because even at school it was obvious what the potential problem with LIBOR was in situations like this.

Sentenced to 4 years, released on license after 2

https://ccrc.gov.uk/news/supreme-court-quashes-city-traders-...

The following bit at the end of the article suggests it may have been 12 years.

>One thing that is for sure is that Palombo won't have to pay the £750k bill he faced for the British government's legal expenses when he was convicted. He had no money, so they gave him 12 years to find it.

No, though that reads like journalistic humour, that would just be 12 years to pay the fine (since for the first four years he'd have been unable to work to pay it off).

A year or two it sounds like. They had a kid around covid and he was out 2022.

He was sentenced to four years; sounds like he served two of them and then would have been out on licence (perhaps a bit earlier because pandemic)

not enough to get a phd

It doesn't say he started his PhD in prison, though. It says he finished it.

Oppenheimer completed his phd in 2 years…

Surely the academic process was different 100 years ago. In the biological sciences, an American phd today is likely to run 4-7 years. Advisor/lab/luck dependent.

No idea about oppenheimers degree tbh, I just remembered it was 2 years from the movie lol.

The American PhD program is pretty weird looking at it from a European perspective.

Here you typically do your undergraduate degree, then a masters, then the PhD.

In USA it seems it’s more common to combine the masters and PhD as a single course, resulting in the inflated duration.

It’s totally possible to do a 2 year (or less) PhD in certain subjects, as you have already done the 2 years equivalent study (1 year in UK?) as part of your masters.

also 2 years in prison flow differently lol

he get to think a lot

Convicts have to pay the government's legal expenses? (At end of article) ... Wild but I suppose there's a certain logic to it.

Not all of it -- the law says they can be required to pay some of the costs, though, yes -- since 2014.

It's definitely been used in complex fraud cases where the convicted person is a high earner.

At the low end in criminal cases heard in magistrates' costs, the convicted will pay a criminal court fee, which is fixed and not big, they can be asked to pay towards the prosecutor's costs, and there can be a victim surcharge (which funds victim support services and is not compensation for the victim), but those are means-tested.

You also have to payback your room and board.

He committed criminal fraud, went to prison for years, and then did a PhD in Philosophy and Critical Theory. Thesis: "Nudity and Disorder. Adventures in Posthumanist Freedom"

Not sure how he can be surprised his former colleagues are now distant:

- was he even a cultural fit for the finance world in the first place

- you can't go off the radar for years and then simply walk back

- now he has a criminal conviction for fraud, which is clearly going to be a problem for his former colleagues

Did you read the article?

He isnt planning on walking back - he had already resigned and aimed to leave the finance industry.

He doesn't have a conviction - it was overturned...

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