I think it works for ‘optimizer’ tech guys who read three columns maximum, or for news/gossip/opinion junkies with money willing to spend $200/month on substacks, but for the average reader the newspaper model is obviously preferable.
I don’t think there’s a huge issue with it though. Before the advent of high speed presses and mass literacy in the mid 19th century newspapers/magazines were niche and expensive with very low circulation in most cases, and that worked for them.
2rafa
27d ago
They probably just enjoy food, a lot of construction workers eat huge portions of greasy fast food twice or more a day, for example, even if you’re expending a lot of calories you’re still very liable to get fat. Bodybuilders and gymbros know they have to both lift and eat well (or at least monitor their caloric intake and maintenance), “strongfat” manual laborers often don’t care. The young ones often do, and in that case they tend to be leaner.
2rafa
26d ago
How do you not have an Indian accent? I would be very surprised if someone who grew up in the US and spent their entire life there didn’t have an American accent. The only cases I’m aware of would be some sub-sects of Ultra-Orthodox Jews that still have Yiddish-inflected American accents (although these are still more American than not, the same is true for their British equivalents) or some Mexican-Americans who grew up in largely Hispanic border communities and almost never interact with non-Spanish-speaking Americans.
I know some very rich Indians who have British or American accents but in the former case they went to boarding school in Britain and in the latter case they typically either go to boarding school in the US or to international schools in Singapore, Switzerland etc from 11 or 13. I looked up Rahul Gandhi on YouTube and even he (very high status Indian) seems to have a strong Indian accent, which is almost funny coming from him because he looks (for obvious reasons) like a swarthy European.
How would you describe your accent? More American, or just international enough that it sounds ‘not Indian’?
The most important thing to understand about investment banking analysts (and associates) is that they do - in the purest, Graeberian sense of the word - a bullshit job. Moreso even than consultants.
Investment banking is a critical part of a market economy. But the role of the analyst and associate is a curious historical oddity. Before modern investment banking emerged in the 1980s the role didn’t really exist; junior bankers were clerks and then the good ones quickly became dealmakers. It emerged because every major investment bank can handle the same IPOs, M&A, secondary offerings and so on in exactly the same way. There is no functional difference whatsoever between hiring Goldman Sachs and hiring Morgan Stanley, or Barclays or Citigroup for that matter, to IPO your big tech business or to issue debt for your public athleisure company. They know the same people at the same funds, can structure the same things in the same way etc.
At the boutique and mid-market level, and in niche markets where capital is harder to find and more picky (like the one I work in), actual skill on the part of bankers is required because it’s not guaranteed that you’ll actually be able to raise money (for example). But at the major bank (‘bulge bracket’) level, even the most retarded banker of all time is not going to have any issue IPO’ing Arm or issuing equity on behalf of Nvidia or Shell.
This led to a strange arms race starting in the late 1980s among bankers about who could add the most ‘value’ to their client offering. The banks operate as a soft cartel in fee terms, so Barclays isn’t going to undercut Goldman by offering half the fees in basis point terms on a deal. But they can compete on flair, and on pitch decks. This, in turn, led to the pitch deck arms race that exists today, where junior bankers work 100 hour weeks making up bullshit numbers for PowerPoint slides that nobody reads in the hope that this will surely lead to us getting the deal and not the shitstains at MS or Bank of America and so on.
In the 1980s, a pitch deck might be a few hastily Xerox’d pages stapled into a booklet. Today it’s a 200 page brochure. No bulge bracket bank can opt-out because then you look like amateurs next to Goldman’s production design (all BB banks have large graphics departments that work on this stuff, not even outsourced to India but often actually in NYC/London). Clients don’t care because they pay the same fee regardless (as mentioned), so they might as well take the brochure.
The analyst economy works for banks. Most analysts leave after a couple of years, either because they’re forced out or go to private equity, those who are good enough and don’t want to leave can stay and eventually rise to become actual dealmakers (above VP you’re essentially working a normal corporate sales job most of the time).
Beyond the fact that the need for the role is nonexistent (analysts perform no intellectual labor, just downloading and copy-pasting from Bloomberg/Factset), I think one of the best things AI could do would be to get everyone to realize how pointless pitchbook inflation has been. But it’s more likely this is just an excuse for layoffs because deal volume is down since 2021.
2rafa
26d ago
Oil and gas, especially exploration/upstream is a unique subfield in IB in that the best teams will actually employ oil engineers with industry experience to run calculations to find minimum viable oil prices etc for projects, but your example is way more complex than what most investment banking analysts do. The average M&A analyst is downloading spreadsheets from Bloomberg and looking through annual/quarterly reports, running rote calculations on them (with many fake numbers) and massaging the resulting data into a few charts that they then spend hours aligning on a PowerPoint. For ultra niche fields they’re more likely to hire a consultant to do the modelling for them if they think they must.
I agree that the analyst (and by extension associate) role is mainly just to create pool from which to hire more senior bankers, though.
2rafa
26d ago
They successfully hired conservatively between 2010 and 2020 even as deal volume recovered post-GFC, then the COVID deal boom happened and they threw a decade of caution out of the window and sperged out, doubling analyst intake for what everyone knew what a temporary thing. Nobody in the industry thought it was a good idea except HR.
I agree that this is most likely an excuse to fire people without blaming declining dealflow.
2rafa
26d ago
It’s also that even though analysts and associates are paid very well by general standards, they’re only paid a very small proportion of the deal fees the bank makes. On a big $20m fee (when apportioning based on bonuses and salary for the subsequent year), ‘the bank’ might make $10m, the ‘vice chairman’ (typically semi-retired senior banker still affiliated with bank because of their connections, some banks will have a different title) makes $2m, the head of the industry team (‘global head of industrials’) might make $1m, the two or three MDs involved may make $500k each, then you down from there through directors/EDs, VPs, associates and down to analysts. Of an analyst’s $60k or $80k bonus (maybe there are four or five staffed on the deal across an industry team and execution), perhaps $10k comes from this deal if one had to pick a number. (This isn’t how bonus pools work, but it illustrates how small the analyst’s share would be).
2rafa
26d ago
LLMs are probably very good at doing what junior bankers do, since what they do is essentially running basic statistics on publicly available financial data (already categorized by the big financial data providers) and then adding some light commentary, charts and visuals for pitches. I remember using FactSet’s primitive auto pitchbook feature in 2014 or 2015 and thinking that this was a job that was going to be automated very soon. But you’re correct that that isn’t really the point.
2rafa
26d ago
Probably a reaction to 70s media being so depressing and dystopian (Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, Taxi Driver).
2rafa
26d ago
We’ll see how much damage it ends up causing. It all seems very telegraphed so far. They may well have told them exactly what they were going to do in advance.
2rafa
26d ago
How is this different from when Iran was allowed to bomb some US bases as payback for Soleimani? This stuff is literally negotiated, Iran just released a statement saying that was it. They even provided several days’ warning so that Israel and allies could prefer their defenses or even evacuate certain sites.
I suppose the real indicator of whether it’s escalation will be the damage.
2rafa
26d ago
They took out the guy who both Iranian and Hamas media proudly said coordinated the IRGC’s support for the October 7th attack on Israel.
Iran doesn’t even recognize Israel so projecting traditional international relations rules onto the conflict doesn’t really make sense. This isn’t different to when the US killed Soleimani in Iraq.
2rafa
26d ago
Taking out Iranian nuclear sites is hard because they’re extremely dispersed around the country and highly fortified, predominantly underground. They’re built to be largely resistant to American air strikes.
2rafa
26d ago
I think the fact that the USAF has bases around and can operate pretty much anywhere in Iraq/Syria/Jordan was probably more relevant.
2rafa
26d ago
The main result has been to reaffirm how utterly hostile the Arab states are to Iran even in the middle of the partial Saudi-Iranian detente. Iran has no force projection, and a combination of the Quds expeditionary force, Hezbollah and a few Shia militias would never be enough to overrun Israel. This has made me a lot more optimistic about Israel’s position in the region; the Arabs and Turks both know that even if the masses hate Israel, Iran is a much more substantial threat. The Arabs just want the Gaza thing to be over (they don’t really care how it ends) and for things to go back to ‘normal’.
2rafa
26d ago
The IDF is under extensive domestic pressure to accurately report military casualties. The fact that there are no great number from yesterday is telling. They let some through the way the US let Iran attack some empty, evacuated US bases after Soleimani.
2rafa
26d ago
If Israel is overrun it won’t be for financial reasons. A billion is nothing to it or its benefactors.
2rafa
25d ago
The Iranian government uses political assassination on foreign soil extensively, though.
2rafa
25d ago
UK capped a lot of child welfare at 2 children for all born after 2017. Probably a good idea for the US.
2rafa
25d ago
Some sports like baseball and basketball are pretty autistically data-obsessed and managers have based a lot of decisions on data for many years.
I was recently listening to a podcast in which an ex professional football player talked about the politics that go on behind the scenes.
He said a lot of what determines if you are a "good" player beyond the fundamentals is akin to astrology or colloquially known as the eye test.
At one point he said "You could be the most talented midfielder in the country but because of manager bias, your reputation and other external factors you will never reach the higher levels."
I read somewhere that soccer/football is pretty unique among sports because games are usually decided by a single point, which means there are far fewer datapoints. The argument was that this makes management much less scientific than most other team sports where scoring is regular and consistent through the game. Soccer is more stochastic, overly reliant on luck, on a sudden mistake by the other team that allows you to convert one of dozens of scoring opportunities into a goal.
2rafa
25d ago
Israel is pretty friendly with Russia, many of Putin’s close allies have Israeli citizenship and the FSB uses Tel Aviv as a spy hub; in the Wirecard case the FSB’s operation was controlled by a Jewish ex-FSB/KGB senior figure whose son (an Israeli lawyer) assisted with the laundering of the funds to support Russia-aligned Libyan rebel groups and Chechen friends of Putin. The last thing Israel wants is a US/Russia war, they don’t like Russia’s alliance with Iran and Assad and therefore participate in some of the power conflict around Armenia/Azerbaijan etc, but Russia isn’t an enemy really.
2rafa
25d ago
Did Hamas not publicly laud him as the main IRGC point man on Hamas funding and the October 7th op?
2rafa
24d ago
I don’t support regime change ops in Iran, but I think the regime has questionable vitality now and, while not at late-80s-USSR level, is kind of coasting on inertia and the successful purging of most internal resistance more than it has huge domestic support.
Surely the strategy is to enlist your aunt to find someone suitable even if you also try on your own? My family never helped me but if a well-connected relative had had suitable candidates of the right class and background I’d at least have looked them up on social media to see if they were hot lol.
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