[Occupymendocino] What's something that is common knowledge at your workplace, but would be mind-blowing to the rest of us?

[Richard Karch]

What's something that is common knowledge at your workplace, but would be mind-blowing to the rest of us?

See also follow-up question: What is commonly known (or believed) in one country, which would be mind-blowing to foreigners?

Joseph Wang, Chief Scientist, Bitquant Research
4k Views • Joseph has 30+ answers in Work

From investment banking front office.....

* Almost all of your money is in cyberspace and has no physical existence at all.  The process of printing money consists of someone at the Federal Reserve typing numbers into a computer system.  

* How floor trading at the exchange no longer exists.  Almost all trading is done by computers.  All those pictures you see of people screaming at each other were taken years ago.

* What several tens of billions of dollars looks like.  They are just numbers in a badly designed computer screen or Excel spreadsheet.

* What a market crash looks and sounds like.  It's a lot of phones ringing.

* How no one on Wall Street knows (or cares) which direction the markets are going.

* How anyone that does have any juicy information is legally forbidden from discussing it, and therefore any information that you get is probably not that juicy.  In particular, anyone talking about finance on television has been *specifically isolated* from any non-public information, and *by law* can only talk about public information.

* How damn close (i.e. two days at the most) the entire world came to total economic collapse in 2008.  By economic collapse, that your bank account were just meaningless and worthless numbers.  Imagine global capitalism as a giant video game, and waking up one morning and seeing "game over" at the ATM.  Almost happened.

* How banks use other people's money.  The corollary of this is that the banks didn't get a massive bailout.  You got a massive bailout because they money that the banks lost was yours.

* How BIG, banks are.  Your typical US megabank employs about 200,000 people.

* How lobbying and legislation works.  On the one hand, politicians aren't in the "pockets" of bankers.  The lobbyist for a Wall Street bank has to explain the banks position on legislation and regulation, and the politician can and does say no.  On the other hand, you or I would not likely to be able to get a conversation with the politician, whereas the bank would at least get listened to because they contributed money to the politicians PAC.

* How banks don't care who is elected as long as they get listened to.  You'll find in the list of campaign contributions that a major bank will contribute to *both* candidates in a race.  It's to get listened to no matter who gets elected.  If you are running for office and you have anything to do with banking, you will get offered campaign contributions from the big banks.  Typically incumbents get more money, but it's common for both candidates to get money.  Banks are smart enough to know they can't swing an election.  The contribution is so that their phone calls get returned.

* How bank employees appreciate lobbyists, because they make sure that the bank doesn't get totally killed by the people with pitchforks.

* How regulatory capture works.  If you are a politician that needs some information on how derivatives work, anyone that you talk to that knows something about derivatives is likely to be working for a bank.  Also, if you are working on a 600 page bill on derivatives regulation, and you talk to a bank, you are likely to find a team of lawyers that has been reading the legislation for the last month, and can come up with some suggestions on what needs to be done.  If you talk to Occupy Wall Street, you aren't.

* How paranoid and out of touch banks are with social media.  

* How people with banking experience usually have no particularly insight as to how to invest your money.  The person that sells you your car probably has no particuarly knowledge about auto mechanics.

* How most people in the banking industry just put their own money in index ETF.

* How many astrophysicists work on Wall Street.  Your typical investment bank has several dozen physics/math Ph.D.'s.  And several thousand computer programmers.

From cosmology and astrophysics ....

* Most of cosmology is based on pretty simple physics.  Once you get down to say 10000 degree gas, the universe is just hot gas, and we know how hot gas behaves

* It's easy to calculate the entire universe.  Once you assume that every part of the universe is more or less the same as any other part, then the equations for calculating the universe become extremely simple.  Because of symmetry, it's easier to model the entire universe than it is to say calculate the behavior of shower curtain blowing in the wind.  This is because of symmetry, because all of the universe is basically the same, you can use a few numbers to describe the entire universe.  Because a shower curtain isn't symmetric, you can't.
Written 31 Jan 2014 • View Upvotes
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