Building a financial system that works for the real economy

I highly recommend this video of a talk given recently by Sony Kapoor at the Global Systems Dynamics Workshop in Berlin. As it happens, I was there and got to see the talk in person; it's funny and very insightful. Kapoor used to work at Lehman Bros (well before it's collapse), and eventually quit investment banking to do more useful things -- he now works at Re-define, a think tank on public policy.

I tried to embed the video here but failed. There seems to be embed protection on it for some reason.

There were a number of other great talks at the meeting as well, all available on video here.

Of Idols and Crises

Here's a quote of the day, perhaps the best metaphor I've heard for where we are now in this financial and economic crisis, a few years downstream of the initial fractures, as authorities (and bankers) in Europe are still trying to duck necessary pain and loss through clever financial slight of hand. From novelist John Lanchester, quoted in Business & Finance:

"It's like there was a giant rumbling noise, the foundations shook, there was a crack in the altar and the golden idol fell down," he says. "And then there was a silence as they picked up the idol, polished it and put it back on the altar and now they're hoping that nobody had noticed. The fact is, we've had three or four supposedly unprecedented crises in the last couple of decades, and these events seem to be getting bigger and more frequent. That suggests to me that we really need to fix the whole architecture of world capitalism, but nothing I've heard suggests that anybody's doing that." 

Truly, nobody is doing that. For the moment, in Greece, in the US, and elsewhere, everything is patchwork, a few small repairs, even the illusion of repairs, and that's it.