Not quite time for dinner. I was off campus after 11 Eastern. Got a script for the hip. Dr. Sartor is a sweetheart.
Munger and Buffett are Great Depression babies. Soros managed to escape from Nazi occupied Hungary as a child during WWII. Life, it seems, is partly about luck.
Munger and Buffett grew up when America's factories were blasting smoke from coal fired furnaces. They invested in what they understood and stayed with it. Neither man understands how the internet works. Never will.
That is far as I will go with that digression.
Next up is Michael Lewis, the famous book writer. He's 60, on the last cusp of the Baby Boom generation. He grew up in New Orleans, went to Princeton, then to the London School of Economics. He worked for Salomon Bros, which went kaput as a bond trader. He has said of that experience that after receiving $200,000 bonuses he didn't feel as if he had done anything truly productive to merit such an enormous sum for a 24 year old.
Anyone can read his books, or listen to them online. There are numerous video interviews. It takes some time to get a grasp of what he is about.
It goes without saying that the bond market bubble associated with the S&L nonsense in the mid 1980s, which is what Liar's Poker is about, was something a precursor concerning what was to happen in the coming century.
The list of financial scandals, the worst being the housing bubble/mortgage crisis in the prior decade, is long. Too long.
It is no surprise to me that the GenXers and later the Millennials often express a deeply cynical view of Wall Street.
I find it somewhat disturbing to read Buffett's and Munger's remarks about Robinhood. In the past 40 years since I've been an investor, subscribing to Barron's, reading the Wall Street Journal, and so forth, all these brokerages have been regularly fined for wrong doings.
Next up deals with the question of what is the future of money? Based on what I can gather from all the interviews and articles by people who have been studying digital currency since its earliest beginnings, it seems to me the central theme has to do with financial autonomy. This means, to me, no more middleman, the middleman being the Big Banks that skim a tiny cut off of every transaction. The main criticism from the crypto advocates center on this question: What do banks do now that one can view as being truly beneficial for society as a whole? And I mean beneficial to the current 8 billion souls on this planet.
Your mobile device will be your bank. You will pay for goods and services, even the baby sitter, with your mobile device. The seller, including the baby sitter, will also have a mobile device. We call it a peer to peer transaction. No bank gets a tiny cut from it.
