Series of bizarre deaths in the financial world this week
business.financialpost.com
business.financialpost.com
* A retired Deutche risk manager, suicide
* An MD at Tata Motors, suicide
* An IT manager at JPMC in London, apparent suicide
* An unnamed marketing professional at Swiss Re, cause unknown
This is more like numerology than a "series of deaths in the financial world". The "financial world" employs many hundreds of thousands of people. especially when generalized to include commercial, retail, and investment banks, asset management firms, the entire insurance industry, hedge funds, market data firms, and analysts. Also, apparently, the automotive industry.
Moreover, these are people with wildly different jobs and levels of seniority.
You can probably generate similar patterns every year, if you look carefully and track, say, IT executives and marketing managers alongside the Chief Economists. If you Google some of the names in this article, you'll see that the news coverage for them frequently does exactly that.
This seems pretty silly. What am I missing?
Makes you wonder what can turn someone at those levels so despondent enough to end it all?
[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/thailand/1060...
When flipping coins, it's rare, but not too rare, to see tails come up five times in a row. When you consider the statistics of suicide, it doesn't seem too far fetched to see a string of five suicides, even within a relatively short amount of time. It really is a shame, and I hope someday the causes will be better understood and made treatable.
US car companies seem to operate under this model, but in the rest of the world the financing income is seen as a useful supplement to income from selling cars.
For example, Tata's increase in profitability last year is attributed to increases sales of Jaguar and Landrover cars[1], not profits from financial services.
[1] http://www.industryweek.com/finance/tata-motors-profit-soars...
These finance packages are quite lucrative in the US market, and for many US manufacturers are more profitable than manufacturing.
(The suicide referred to was an executive of Tata Motors)
Not to dismiss this series of bizarre death but rather, just feeling frustrated that I can say neither "Woah, something's going on" nor "nothing to see here folks, move along".
That would make a week with seven deaths seem suspicious, but let's consider the Bernouilli distribution, considering there has been roughly 700 weeks since 2007: ( (1-( 1-(15/100000/52))^50000 * (15/100000/52))^7 ) ^700 )
Yeah, that's unlikely.
The article also doesn't count seven financial industry suicides in a week. It counts 3 (in that week, and in the [insanely broad] finance industry), and an auto executive.
My point was more: when it comes to conspiracy, stay away from story-telling, and do the math. That forces you to focus on assumption, such as the actual size for the group considered.
1) Tata's managing director Karl Slym
2) Swiss Re's Tim Dickenson communications director
3) Russell Investments’ chief economist Mike Dueker
4) Deutsche Bank's William Broeksmit to become chief risk officer (didn't materialize)
5) Zurich Insurance Group's finance chief Pierre Wauthier
Without knowing the baseline population they're willing to consider in assembling their count, it's hard to say, but this might very easily be explained as a stochastic process that happens to be hitting a peak. It might even be the case that this sort of death rate happens all the time among the vast pool of "financial workers," but the Financial Post just happened to notice it this week.