At last, reading my 'toread' list

One of the real beauties of the website Delicious.com is keeping track of things that I want to look at in more detail later. Delicious.com, for the uninitiated, is a site that lets you log links that you like. You can make little notes about them, but, more usefully, you can make little tags on all of your links, and if you want to find a bunch of related links, you can just type in your delicious address plus a little “/tagname” at the end, and a page will pop up with all the tags you’ve given that name.

Very, very nice. So two of my favorite tags are “toread” and “towatch.” The former for writing and the latter for videos (if you couldn’t work that one out). Obviously, the writing is a bit of a larger investment, and my “toread” list tends to pile up. I log things on there that I find through my blog reading or stuff that I get sent at work that I don’t have time to look at or just stuff I happen across that I want to look at more closely.

8:16PM. After some IM delays, I am starting in with light reading: Todd Pudrum’s Vanity Fair profile piece of Sec. Henry Paulson during the worst of the financial meltdown. The photospread of Shakira in Paris couture has been opened in an as yet unseen tab.

8:24PM. Got a phone call. Anyway, holy crap! Paulson is putting out a book: On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System. Sounds precious. These updates brought to you by Bushmill’s, btw.

8:34PM. Paulson has given over $100M of his own money to eco-causes??? Who knew. I read the book about O’Neill’s run at Treasury, too, and sort of fell in love with O’Neill. He was, by the way, also pretty invested in making his very dirty company as clean as possible, which I find very endearing, if not quite redemptive.

8:38PM. Jon Corzine became a New Jersey Senator because Paulson beat him in the bid to take over Goldman Sachs. Faskinating. Oh yeah… Shakira is looking pretty great in this spread, by the way. Not so hot, but really pretty. If you’re curious.

8:45PM. God, someday I want to be a table thrower. I know, in my heart, that I am definitely a table thrower. 8:48PM. OK, I’m reading this at the moment when Paulson still thought that we were in a dry forest but maybe the lightning would never strike before teh rain had come. Suddenly I am remembering the early morning workouts I took at the North Philly Y and seeing the interest-only mortgage refi deals they were showing. Believe me, the “I Told You So” on this one is in my DNA at this point, but nothing had quite taken me back to that moment like pg 3 of this story just did.

9:00PM.

“Would it be more satisfying if we were solving fundamental, long-term structural economic issues?” he asked at one point. “Of course. But it’s my job to play the hand that I’ve been dealt, and to play it as well as I can.” The hand that Paulson was dealt, as everyone knows, was the greatest disruption in the world economy in nearly 80 years…”

9:22PM. Yes, I’ve been distracted. So what?

“Around this time, Newsweek ran a cover story on Paulson with the headline KING HENRY. It was not helpful. “After that article, I had a number of people I was dealing with, and they all say, ‘You’re not king, O.K.?’ In private, on the phone, ‘You’re not king.’ And I’m saying to myself, Thank you, Newsweek, you know? You really made my job easier.” “

9:33PM. Paulson believes that the biggest mistakes in history are not doing enough. On to the next item!

10:27PM. I think my friend Ben is right. I am inclined to rather like Rick Bookstaber.

4/21. “Does anyone really get a benefit in having the latency of their trade cut by milliseconds – except for the fact that their competitor is also spending the money to cut his latency? Should anyone care if a news event hits market prices in twenty-nine milliseconds rather than thirty milliseconds? Does it do anything to make the markets more efficient? Does it add any value to society?

We usually do not think about trading in terms of social value, but trading often does have social value, and it should.”

10:44. On “fat tails,” that is — really bad things sometimes happening in the market because every now and then everything goes really haywire in an unpredictable way:

So, to recap, we all know that there are fat tails; it doesn’t do any good to state the mantra over and over again that securities do not follow a Normal distribution. Really, we all get it. We should be constructive in trying to move risk management beyond the point of simply noting that there are fat tails, beyond admonitions like “hey, you know, shit happens, so be careful.” And that means understanding the dynamics that create the fat tails, in particular, that lead to market crisis and unexpected linkages between markets.

10:48PM. This is a big deal right now. It’s about how the risk of any particular asset is assessed. People are criticizing it because it fails to account for the world going to shit, tho, of course, if the world went to shit on a daily basis we wouldn’t have a world and assuming it will isn’t much of a position to do business from: even tho, of course, it will.

OK, team, I didn’t get thru as much as I would have liked, but I definitely explored a lot of big ideas tonight. I also read this, which wasn’t on the list but I think I learned an awful lot from it. Maybe someday I’ll be intact enough to live something like Fred Stocking did.

Note from 2020: The artist in the blog at the end is still at it, still great.

Other note from 2020: This is a weird, weird post, right? 🤠