the financial manhattan project
DESCRIPTION
Yet another sad aftermath in this long road of monetary madness is that the best and brightest settle for the illusion of fast money and the high stakes of adrenaline fueled risk.TRANSCRIPT
The Financial Manhattan Project
“It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance
that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.”
-Robert Oppenheimer
Recently, I was saddened to learn that my college physics professor died a few years
back. I don't quite remember what led me down that path, but the walk down memory
lane circled back to the realization of yet another dangerous and sad financial
phenomenon evolving like a cancer on culture and society.
I've been re-visiting fundamental physics, and with the internet these days, you can
explore just about anything.
My old professor recommended that I read the Richard Feynman lectures. Of course,
nowadays you can simply watch them - almost as if you were there.
As many of you know, Feynman became one of the most famous and visible physicists of
the 20th century. Part of his charm, which remains today, is the Bronx accent that he
never lost, as if some part of him never left the working class.
By most accounts, he was a genius. He was reading calculus books at age 13. He later
won a Nobel Prize. He was recruited during World War II to work on the Manhattan
Project.
And he wasn't terribly conflicted about his participation. This is what he said about the
experience years later (try and hear the Bronx accent):
"Now, with regard to our own things as human beings, naturally I myself, for example,
worked on the bomb during the war. Now how do I feel about that? I have a philosophy
that it doesn't do any good to go and make regrets about what you did before but to try to
remember how you made the decision at the time.”
“…if the scientists in Germany could have developed this thing, then we would be
helpless, and I think it would be the end of the civilization at that time. I don’t know how
long the civilization is going to last anyway. So the main reason why I did work on it at
the time was because I was afraid that the Germans would do it first, and I felt a
responsibility to society to develop this thing to maintain our position in the war".
Obviously, by that point in his life he had plenty time to develop his rationalization; a
plausible one, by any account. His post war achievements were evidently heavily
influenced by his experience at Los Alamos.
What would it be like for a young Feynman today - or the many like him?
From what I've seen among my peers, it is probably very likely that Feynman would be
recruited into finance. Obviously, not to participate in a war effort - though certainly
many of the products of modern finance with their extreme leverage and opacity are
indeed what Warren Buffet characterized as "financial weapons of mass destruction".
Of course there are currency wars, which in the end are simply private conflicts fought
between (quasi-governmental, but ultimately private) central banking cartels that simply
use the government or law as a leverage point – with massive, practically all-
encompassing collarateral damage.
In many ways, this 'friendly fire' has us witnessing the destruction of the working class,
including the scientists and engineers that could have been the Feynman's of
tomorrow. There is the official labor force participation rate to prove this.
Unfortunately, our best and brightest settle for the illusion of fast money and the high
stakes of adrenaline fueled risk, with very little personal consequence - but mostly
without any real contribution to the world around them.
Many end up on the trading desks, managing blocks of electronic transactions via
sophisticated and high speed computer operations – the so called algorithims fueled by
high-frequency trading platforms run on a networks outside of the Wall Street exchanges.
Yet, in every sense, they have the bricks backing them, providing liquidity and running
regulatory interference.
Sure, maybe these young bright minds are free to choose. And I would not suggest taking
away a choice. But the system, and the faith at the root of the churn - a Ponzi, fiat-driven,
and leverage-based system that promises wealth and riches out of nothing is immoral'
criminal and forced upon all of us via decption.
The system destroys any hopes of a broad, organic, diverse economy of developing.
The designers of algorithms recruited from the physics departments from the Ivy Leagues
create, not proofs that might hold the key to unifying the principles and laws of nature,
but expensive problems that go on plaguing humanity.
Instead, they choose to game the system, living Las Vegas - above the law and ultimately
destructive; fooling themselves that the bonuses, ruthless competition, and anti-social
behavior holds the key to some ephemeral beauty of nature.
Of course, nature has a funny (if not so gentle) way of righting wrongs in the end.
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