Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 199 posts

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#151

Post by yborg »

eine_zwei wrote: post #53

Agree with all the praise. However, reading him long enough, I started to get annoyed with the blase approach to the Wall Street(tm) transgressions. I do not think it is a case of pandering to your audience. The following quote (about his time in Dealbreaker) captures it perfectly: >Part of the problem was that he couldn’t really access a contempt for Wall Street titans. He was of the place, and he found its workings…

I actually find his approach illustrative - even those in the business not inclined to completely disregard the intent behind any rules think of the whole enterprise as a great game divided into competitors and civilians, who are mostly just collateral damage in these contests. There is also a general acceptance of the idea that anything not forbidden is compulsory - if someone gets around the rules to do something others outside the game might consider unethical, then that is the fault of the rulemakers for not being clever enough to write the rules well enough, and in fact it is incumbent upon the players to expose such loopholes. Because leaving money on the table is really the only sin on Wall Street.

As a civilian it's important to understand this mindset when dealing with the financial industry at any level because if you don't, you're going to be on the short end of the things Matt writes about.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#152

Post by Nimitz14 »

polote wrote: post #37
phasetransition wrote: post #25

I'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always enjoy reading Matt, and often learn. To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...

only 150k? that's seems like huge for something which is almost a niche. How many people subscribe to newsletters? on these people how many are interested about the opinion of one guy on the details of market finance?

Dude matt levine is a legend. I think that despite having no connection with the finance industry.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#153

Post by 0xCMP »

kokey wrote: post #82
avalys wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy his column particularly because he talks about all of this scheming and maneuvering in a straightforward and neutral way. I can decide for myself if something is immoral or offensive or whatever, I don’t need my news sources to decide that for me.

I also think he approaches this like a lawyer, where what is right and wrong is constantly evolving and people are always testing the limits of it. People will keep on finding surprising ways to try beat the system, the system will always try new ways to prevent it but those ways will have unintended consequences. I think this has to be interesting to you if you want to have a good grasp of it.

My favorite thing related to this is how it's always hard to know who exactly is "wrong" without reading the whole thing most times.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#155

Post by Tycho »

xyzzyz wrote: post #130
supernova87a wrote: post #128

I especially liked his column about the college admissions scandal, and it wasn't that it was unfair, it was that it was theft . Theft from the colleges. Because you know, they already sell their admissions: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha... Here is one thing that U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in announcing the charges: “There can be no separate college admissions system for the weal…

This is a good example of what corruption in America looks like. America enjoys a reputation of being a rather non-corrupt country. To large degree, this is true: bribing scandals are rare, and most Americans would be completely aghast at the idea of passing an envelope under the table to the official who is responsible for issuing building permits. Instead, the corruption in the US operates through completely transp…

It’s pretty benign when you think about it. Rich, successful people creating public goods so that their less-brilliant children can save face. What better trade-off are we going to get?

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#156

Post by overdrivetg »

arcticbull wrote: post #138
dash2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, among developed countries the US has a relatively high corruption level, I believe. (Insert many caveats about how difficult corruption is to measure.)

America ranks 23rd on the Perception of Corruption Index. Australia, Canada and the UK are 12th, and New Zealand 1st. [1] [1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi

The name of this index is like clickbait gone awry... Couldn't they have gone for something more like the Perception of Integrity Index since being #1 means "least corrupt"?

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#157

Post by leroy_masochist »

I was an intern at Goldman in the summer of 2010, right after we moved into the new building. One day about halfway through the internship, a VP told me to call him so that he could explain a couple of concepts relevant to a few pages we were putting together for a book (client presentation) due the next day.

Matt spent about 20 minutes on the phone with me walking me through a few derivatives-related topics and it was the most interesting and fun part of the summer by far. That guy is smart and funny -- it's not an act for his column.

He may have thought he was bad at his job but from my perspective he exemplified the good part about working at GS -- really smart people, often with a wicked sense of humor, who go out of their way to help each other out.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#158

Post by Klinky »

Tycho wrote: post #155
xyzzyz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good example of what corruption in America looks like. America enjoys a reputation of being a rather non-corrupt country. To large degree, this is true: bribing scandals are rare, and most Americans would be completely aghast at the idea of passing an envelope under the table to the official who is responsible for issuing building permits. Instead, the corruption in the US operates through completely transp…

It’s pretty benign when you think about it. Rich, successful people creating public goods so that their less-brilliant children can save face. What better trade-off are we going to get?

It's not benign. Your comment is an example of rich people hitting the easy button, and still being considered a "success" when doing so. Also I'd prefer public institutions to not be reliant on magic philanthropists or rich people with dumb kids. Just tax rich people more and build the needed buildings from public funds.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#159

Post by thundergolfer »

Tycho wrote: post #155
xyzzyz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good example of what corruption in America looks like. America enjoys a reputation of being a rather non-corrupt country. To large degree, this is true: bribing scandals are rare, and most Americans would be completely aghast at the idea of passing an envelope under the table to the official who is responsible for issuing building permits. Instead, the corruption in the US operates through completely transp…

It’s pretty benign when you think about it. Rich, successful people creating public goods so that their less-brilliant children can save face. What better trade-off are we going to get?

It is highly contestable that millions of dollars ending up in the already mega-wealthy Ivy league colleges is a public good.

Considering how this could possibly be a public good, the most obvious way is that money into these institutions produces knowledge that then produces benefits in wider society. This fits mostly with the definition:

> In economics, a public good (also known as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, in that individuals cannot be excluded from use or could benefit from without paying for it, and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others or the good can be

It is true that in some cases education produces knowledge which itself becomes non-excludable and non-rivalrous, or that knowledge produces some other good which is both those things, but the multi-million dollar donations to Ivy-league colleges made by the super-rich so that their children participate in elite networks is pretty tenuously tied to this mechanism of 'education as a public good'.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#160

Post by arcticbull »

overdrivetg wrote: post #156
arcticbull wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America ranks 23rd on the Perception of Corruption Index. Australia, Canada and the UK are 12th, and New Zealand 1st. [1] [1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi

The name of this index is like clickbait gone awry... Couldn't they have gone for something more like the Perception of Integrity Index since being #1 means "least corrupt"?

I never thought about it that way, haha, good call-out.
Post reply on HN