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Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

bloomberg.com

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Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#71

Post by Ntrails »

rrcaptain wrote: post #67
yellowstuff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a ton of first hand knowledge on the risk appetite of banks or the effect of banking regulation. But I assert that Matt Levine is very knowledgeable about these things and he disagrees with you. His points are that multiple 10 figure fines, higher capital requirements, and a general culture shift have actually made banks less profitable and less risky, as was intended. EG: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/…

Until you start throwing executives in prison, nothing will change long term. 10 figure fines are nothing compared to how much many Americans lost in the housing market crash. Consider how many people got foreclosed upon improperly. The loss of quality of life (and actual life) due to Wall Street greed is unmeasurable, but surely more than 10 figures.

I acknowledge that I'm in the minority but I find it really hard to understand the idea that "The secured loan you took out and can no longer afford to pay? They're going to take the collateral" isn't the whole fucking point of a mortgage.

This idea that the banks foreclosing is somehow a sign of greed boggles my mind. Now, sure there is a bunch of consumer protection around to help 'honest Joe' out when times are tough - but it isn't going to magically stop a crunch point coming where either you keep paying off the loan or you lose the house.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#72

Post by elmar »

m00n wrote: post #70
elmar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that you want to hire a woman that is a blog writer on a radical Musulin country (where woman don't have the right to property) how you are going to pay for the services. Imagine that you want to hire a remote software developer from North Korea. Imagine that you want to send a donation to Wikileaks or similar organization that is banned from using the financial system. Imagine you are a Syrian war refugee th…

And how does your Kenyan/North Korean/Syrian person buy gasoline/rice/paper with this asset? Meanwhile, drug cartels, first world millenials and financial investors are in possession of ~100% of this technology. They are shaping it to further their gains, scamming the naive, and undercutting legitimate sanctions and laws.

> And how does your Kenyan/North Korean/Syrian person buy gasoline/rice/paper with this asset?

Ideally, the seller would accept the cryptocurrency directly, that is what is happening on Venezuela that the country currency is completely worthless. Another not ideal option is to have local gateways that convert to local currency.

> Meanwhile, drug cartels, They are still using dollars maybe Monero, but if the technology is good enough that the goverments can get informations on the transactions or censor it, offcourse bad actors will use it, technology is not inherently good or bad is what people do with it. Personaly I am worried with the 3 Billion that don't have financial services not a small minority bad actors that already does their business using Fiat currencies.

> first world millenials and financial investors are in possession of ~100% of this technology. They are shaping it to further their gains, scamming the naive, and undercutting legitimate sanctions and laws.

That is a really problem and personally I think that the solution will be the creation of new blockchain protocols that have the genesis on developing countries.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#73

Post by brwsr »

Always funny to see people in finance call crypto currencies "virtual currencies". Do they mean fiat currency is not virtual? Does it represent a real value or so? IMHO it's even worse, they keep increasing the maximum supply, devalue the worthless paper even more. But at least they have a chic word for it: Quantitive easing.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#74

Post by isolli »

brwsr wrote: post #73

Always funny to see people in finance call crypto currencies "virtual currencies". Do they mean fiat currency is not virtual? Does it represent a real value or so? IMHO it's even worse, they keep increasing the maximum supply, devalue the worthless paper even more. But at least they have a chic word for it: Quantitive easing.

Central banks increase the supply to keep inflation stable (at a first approximation). Monetary intervention (in the form of quantitative easing) was required to keep the economy from crashing once fiscal policy couldn't. If you think it devalued the dollar you're utterly wrong.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#75

Post by [deleted] »

rrcaptain wrote: post #67
yellowstuff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a ton of first hand knowledge on the risk appetite of banks or the effect of banking regulation. But I assert that Matt Levine is very knowledgeable about these things and he disagrees with you. His points are that multiple 10 figure fines, higher capital requirements, and a general culture shift have actually made banks less profitable and less risky, as was intended. EG: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/…

Until you start throwing executives in prison, nothing will change long term. 10 figure fines are nothing compared to how much many Americans lost in the housing market crash. Consider how many people got foreclosed upon improperly. The loss of quality of life (and actual life) due to Wall Street greed is unmeasurable, but surely more than 10 figures.

[deleted]

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#76

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bduerst wrote: post #48
yellowstuff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a ton of first hand knowledge on the risk appetite of banks or the effect of banking regulation. But I assert that Matt Levine is very knowledgeable about these things and he disagrees with you. His points are that multiple 10 figure fines, higher capital requirements, and a general culture shift have actually made banks less profitable and less risky, as was intended. EG: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/…

Rather than link dump his blog (which I read) can you quote the specific sections? His weekly opinion posts cover a large variety of non-related topics and nobody knows which one you're referencing. There also isn't anything there about the subprime auto loans, which even the esteemed Matt Levine acknowledges are an issue: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-19/fraud-sat... > Here's a story about subprime…

> the lack of any major financial reform has left commercial banks open to continue making risky investments

>>> Here's a story about subprime car loans

Are the subprime auto loans being issued by commercial banks?

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#77

Post by majani »

tw1010 wrote: post #26

Could anyone explain to me a scenario where bitcoin and/or blockchain does not make a huge impact on the world within 5-10 years? There seems to be so much excitement and real action moving in its direction that I have a hard time imagining how exactly this would all just go nowhere.

It might just settle in a tiny corner of the web eventually. This is not the first wave of excitement about decentralisation. I remember there was a similar wave of excitement with torrents and decentralised file storage, but convenience and regulation helped centralised storage to win. If I'm to bet it'll be the same case with cryptocurrency

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#78

Post by brazzy »

rrcaptain wrote: post #67
yellowstuff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a ton of first hand knowledge on the risk appetite of banks or the effect of banking regulation. But I assert that Matt Levine is very knowledgeable about these things and he disagrees with you. His points are that multiple 10 figure fines, higher capital requirements, and a general culture shift have actually made banks less profitable and less risky, as was intended. EG: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/…

Until you start throwing executives in prison, nothing will change long term. 10 figure fines are nothing compared to how much many Americans lost in the housing market crash. Consider how many people got foreclosed upon improperly. The loss of quality of life (and actual life) due to Wall Street greed is unmeasurable, but surely more than 10 figures.

Fines and damages are different things.

Damage payments would be meant to actually compensate for the amount of damage caused, but where exactly is an "unmeasurable" amount of money going to come from? Additionally, if you did make Wall Street pay "unmeasurable" damage and all of it went bankrupt and disappeared, the result would be worse for everyone. Yeah, that's not fair, but such is life.

On the other hand, the point of a fine is to discourage unwanted behaviour. To have that effect, it only needs to be larger than the profit from the unwanted behaviour, and 10 figures is probably large enough for that.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#79

Post by yellowstuff »

rrcaptain wrote: post #67
yellowstuff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a ton of first hand knowledge on the risk appetite of banks or the effect of banking regulation. But I assert that Matt Levine is very knowledgeable about these things and he disagrees with you. His points are that multiple 10 figure fines, higher capital requirements, and a general culture shift have actually made banks less profitable and less risky, as was intended. EG: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/…

Until you start throwing executives in prison, nothing will change long term. 10 figure fines are nothing compared to how much many Americans lost in the housing market crash. Consider how many people got foreclosed upon improperly. The loss of quality of life (and actual life) due to Wall Street greed is unmeasurable, but surely more than 10 figures.

This is definitely the conventional wisdom I see here and on Reddit, but I disagree.

Banking has changed, perhaps permanently. It is less profitable and by many measures less risky than before.

And I disagree with throwing people in prison for losing money and hurting the economy. I want people to go to prison because they have committed crimes. The government could certainly have been more aggressive about charging individuals, but if you look at the cases they actually brought they were against low level people and they had a lot of trouble showing any of them actually broke laws. Most of the actually harmful decisions by high level bankers were not clearly illegal.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#80

Post by CryptoPunk »

rayiner wrote: post #18
CryptoPunk wrote: post #9

This is what fuels the revolving door. Regulations create a class of workers with previous experience in the regulatory and political system, that fetch an access premium. Another example of this is members of Congress who become lobbyists seeing an average increase of 1,500% in their salary upon the career change.

Consider a different example: someone participates in adding threading to the C++ standard. They then get hired at a development tools company to help implement the standard. Anything unseemly there? Your characterization rests on the premise that the regulations are a priori negative. If you start from the premise that the regulations are good things, then there isn’t necessarily anything wrong or inconsistent about…

>>Consider a different example: someone participates in adding threading to the C++ standard. They then get hired at a development tools company to help implement the standard. Anything unseemly there?

Code is objective and apolitical. Regulatory enforcement is a people business, and having the right people on your team can affect how regulatory agencies treat you, irrespective of your actual conduct vis-à-vis the regulations.

An open standard can also be studied by anyone. The secret rules and customs of regulatory agencies are only privy to those who worked in the agencies.

>>Second, the industry welcomes some level of regulation, in order to reestablish trust with consumers that might otherwise be scared off. Third, regulation gets implemented on the premise that its good for both consumers and for the industry, because it allows the industry to overcome trust barriers.

I suspect that is not the main reason industry players support regulations. I think it's far more likely that their support is motivated by a desire to create regulatory moats to competition.

An example of this would be the "Money Services Round Table":

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20110510/in-fifty-days...

There is empirical evidence that regulations exacerbate income inequality:

https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/McLaughlin-Regulation-...

This supports the 'lobbying for regulations as an anticompetitive measure' thesis.

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