He shot the movie very differently. By basically putting a couple of cameras in the corner of the room with zooms, you never knew who they were shooting or when or how. There were no marks. You weren’t aware of, “This is your moment.” You could be giving it everything you have, and they could actually be shooting someone’s hands writing something on a desk.
.. He was very specific about how each sect within the financial world dressed and behaved. He explained the different cliques almost like a John Hughes movie would, or maybe “Mean Girls.” What brand you wear meant something in terms of where you’re at and who you are. Zegna versus Canali. There’s a real difference, and which you wore said something about you.
Big Pharma has become addicted to an illusion
Pharmaceuticals companies used to be research enterprises that discovered and developed drugs. Then they became marketing giants, skilled at selling as many blockbuster pills as possible. Lately, they have turned into mergers and acquisitions machines, buying and selling medicines invented by others. It is hard to view their evolution as progress.
The Future of Finance
The point of finance, he argues, is to connect savers and borrowers — end-users, that is, not financial intermediaries. The test of a financial system is whether a household with surplus funds, say, and a company or government needing to borrow for investment can be connected at low cost and in a way that makes both parties better off. Correctly understood, all the institutions that lie between such end-users exist to serve this underlying purpose.
.. Does something of social value happen when investment bank A transacts profitably with asset manager B? Not necessarily. Only if the gain somehow makes its way through to end-users. If that doesn’t happen, the costs of the intermediation amount, in effect, to a tax on everybody else.
Alexander Hamilton on paper versus gold.
Gold and silver, where they are employed merely as the instruments of exchange and alienation, have been not improperly denominated dead stock; but when deposited in banks to become the basis of a paper circulation, which takes their character and place as the signs or representatives of value, they then acquire life, or, in other words, an active and productive quality. This idea, which appears rather subtle and abstract in a general form, may be made obvious and palpable by entering into a few particulars. It is evident, for instance, that the money which a merchant keeps in his chest, waiting for a favorable opportunity to employ it, produces nothing till that opportunity arrives.
But if, instead of locking it up in this manner, he either deposits it in a bank or invests it in the stock of a bank, it yields a profit during the interval in which he partakes, or not, according to the choice he may have made of being a depositor or a proprietor; and when any advantageous speculation offers, in order to be able to embrace it, he has only to withdraw his money if a depositor or, if a proprietor, to obtain a loan from the bank, or to dispose of his stock; an alternative seldom or never attended with difficulty when the affairs of the institution are in a prosperous train. His money, thus deposited or invested, is a fund upon which himself and others can borrow to a much larger amount. It is a well-established fact that banks in good credit can circulate a far greater sum than the actual quantum of their capital in gold and silver.