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?