Where the crypto rubber meets the Road of Finance…
December 11, 2011
Why (my, all) financial systems fail — information complexity
I spent over a decade building the snappiest financial system around. In that time I pursued one goal of efficiency: reduction of complexity. This wasn't only goodness in an angelic sense, it was a pragmatic goal to reduce my own costs in building systems.
The result was pretty spectacular: we were settling trades in seconds and doing so with every leg firmly fastened to the ground. That is, the whole thing was running with direct concrete ties to assets.
But, the big players weren't interested. Indeed they were more than uninterested, they were highly interested in making sure this would never ever happen. Time after time, the message was delivered: Never. Other companies received the same message, so after a few years, I started to take it seriously.
At the time I hypothesised that the reason for this was insider fraud, or at least profits capture. The complexities were endemic and there were very few people who could see the whole picture. So, I theorised that those who could understand the complexities were cashing in on their advantage; from the inside. And some very few who cashed in were also driving the information agenda, as their success made them both wealthy and influential: more complexity.
Of course such a hypothesis is unlikely to find proof. By its very nature, how do you prove such a tendency towards chaos? Here comes an alternate perspective from ZeroHedge, citing two papers (1, 2):
And the punchline: “Liquidity requires symmetric information, which is easiest to achieve when everyone is ignorant. This determines the design of many securities, including the design of debt and securitization.” Reread the last statement as it explains perhaps better than anything, the true functioning of modern capital markets and why they are terminally broken: in order to preserve the system, the banking cartel need to make everything of virtually infinite complexity so that no one has a clear understanding of what is going on!
Phi Beta Iota: In brief, finance is fraud. As William Greider documents in his book, The Soul of Capitalism, financial instruments (incomprehensible to their own vendors) appreciated seventeen times while real assets appreciated five times. Twelve is the fraud-complexity-corruption delta.
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