Thrilled About The Future

Stories of the 'lifestyle' experienced these days by people who work on Wall Street – especially the new recruits, fresh out of University – have increasingly been rather negative. These stories speak of long hours, lack of respect from others about the jobs these people do, and the failure of the money to give satisfaction.

Oh god, did I live and work through the last of the best of times on Wall Street?

Less stuff in Ali Baba's cave...
A good thing - less complicated!

Okay I was actually in Chicago at the time but I don't remember any bad things about being there. And when I was working in Australasia in finance and economics, and working the same never-ending days and probably right through weekends as well, I don't remember any of it as being onerous at all.

The fact is, though, that the media and many people in banking are not facing the reality that money has moved away from the usual 'big tall building' scene and into the hands of little guys with clever computing and a lot of unfettered creativity. And it isn't even true anymore, although it may have been for a while, that these 'little guys' nevertheless gravitated, and still gravitate, to the traditional money centres. This blip in the flow may have been added to by the so-called 'low latency' traders.

The flow, is over the cliff of relevancy. Wall Street is irrelevant.

Once people know in their gut that the money has really moved elsewhere, they stay away from the financially dead carcass. What this means for the entire world, especially the one the media has to report on every day, I am not entirely sure.

Wall Street is incapable of financing the next big forward moves for business, industry, and especially, technology. Didn't think I'd ever see the day when such a thing would be said but it is true now, today. The money Wall Street uses has too many strings on it. And the minds behind Wall Street are just not that strong anymore.

Fassbender (above) will not make the cut
 for next Bond - how to damage
an 'unassailable franchise;' just follow the 007 producers!

I glanced across an article in one of the luxury websites the other day about why an old fashioned fountain pen could be worth $40,000 in a digital electronic world, and I haven't even read the article yet. I suppose nostalgia is always a good enough reason for me. I still have a shopping list. Not a lot of things on the list are to do with computers or devices. I already have all the ones (and they are a very modest suite) that I need to have to engage in very exciting things. I remember being inside Honeywell's big mainframe rooms back in the Seventies, and my father knew a few execs from IBM. I think I retained the 'feel' of it all: because when I hold the small digital devices I use today, I do realize that I am in charge of significantly more computing power than those executives had back then. What excites me, is not the fear of the fact that modern computing is almost universally democratic – in other words, everybody has such computing power. But the fact that as far as creativity goes, it would take a long day to find anyone even close to the capability pre-installed at birth inside my own mind. And I am quite thrilled about the future. How about you?

Now The Files Are Closed.

Now that the files are closed...

A long time ago, the Russian (Federal) Security Bureau inserted some operatives into the London private membership club scene – this is where rich kids and wealthy and time-abundant wastrels go and think they are hanging out with genuine high society. Unlike the popular images of such places, in reality they are all either run-down inside and rather shoddy-looking, or just plain monuments to poor taste.

The importance to you is this – you only imagine you know anything at all about the infamous collapse of Shearson Lehman... You only imagine you know what really went on with Bernie Madoff...

But now that the files are closed, I will tell you what you need to watch out for when a confluence of events and types of people come together.

When I say, the files are closed, I mean the Russian files. Western files are pathetically sad contrivances invented by Oxford graduate-types to create facades meant to convince the theoretically dumb public about who is doing what to whom.

What Ghengis Khan might look like,
if he were around today. Or not.

Here is a picture, a very generously flattering one, of Robert Tchenguiz, the ex-Lehman top-line securities dealer, who went on after he left Lehman's to becoming one of the seriously well-off owners of property in London's Mayfair. He's not a Russian operative however. No indeed. But he was one of the people being watched very closesly.

And the meaning of that is that almost nothing that has happened in the so-called world of high finance over the last ten or even twenty years has escaped the strategic analysis department inside the control centre of 'Ancient Ruhm...'

The world is supposed to believe without question, that Madoff burnt $65 billion from only the world's most esteemed banks and finance experts. And by the way, in this same vein, Tchenguiz (who changed his family name from Khadouri although even then, he's actually Jewish) has $1.8 billion of personal wealth. These are all amazing people. True geniuses. Even Madoff really, since he was able to sell rubbish at will to only the world's most celebrated financial houses.

Which brings me to today's world. It isn't so easy to see where the rich young kids who have made their billions from gadgets and software go to drink alcohol and flirt with females (government agents unbeknownst to them). It isn't going to be so simple to thieve from these. Oh, am I saying that various government agencies steal from rich people? My my. Fancy saying such a thing.

All the same, not so easy to send agents to Mongolia to see the latest high fashion shows being attended by the new rich kids – especially not when the actual 'lords of Mongolian cashmere' are already British and will be able to detect a few inconsistencies in the sudden 'casual' appearances of English roughnecks and toughs dressed in cheap Hugo Boss pretending to be fellow members of the idle rich. What am I saying here?! My god. Nothing bad ever happens to English businessmen in China! Does it?

Mongolian fashion designer Ochirjantson's work

As I say... Now that the file is closed.

Put it this way though, if you are a rich new kid, and you see a rough guy dressed in a cheap Hugo Boss suit moving in your circles, don't get taken in by the story that he hails from Mayfair. People who sell wind-up radios into conflict zones because governments there ban the sale of batteries also often hail from Mayfair. Plenty of money to be made in war zones. And not always through the sale of actual exploding things and ballistic items. I knew this German industrial sales rep once who positioned himself in Asia and kept his eye out for sudden large production runs of wind-up radios. And he always said he could tell who knew a war was going to start well before it happened, and therefore regularly also, as far as he was concerned, who was really behind it. And I can also tell you the only two countries that he ever specified in particular, and the USA, by the way, was not one of them. When the frozen orange juice futures went up, he reckoned, it was already far past the point where the radios had been made. FOJ meant the US was going somewhere. I don't think there is a wind-up radios futures market. As far as I know.

David Brown's Speedback GT.
Out now. Retro-modern.