

NYC finance vs. Silicon Valley startup scene 	  - TriinT
http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show%20Post.aspx?PostIDKey=106111	 

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ardit33
"Finance is safe in that it provides the certainty of getting rich within ten
years (unless the industry changes in some on a fundamental level in some
unlikely way)"

\--Hmmm.. . I wonder how is it working for him now, if he is 'rich' yet.
Remember, this post was done in 2007.

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joe_the_user
The funny thing is that I'm a math guy - actually doing more math programming
finally - but I also realize that "quants" are utterly bankrupt. Paul Krugman
is right - Obama has made serious error in trying to restart the finance
machine.

That doesn't mean we won't go up that hill again - just that if we do, the end
_after that_ will make even the present circumstances look cheery.

~~~
Rod
_"I also realize that "quants" are utterly bankrupt. Paul Krugman is right -
Obama has made serious error in trying to restart the finance machine."_

I think you're painting things with a very broad brush. While it's certainly
true that there's a financial crisis of global proportions, it's also true
that there's a whole world out there outside of the U.S., and that world is
not under Obama's influence.

Are quants bankrupt? Well, maybe in NYC. But NYC has not been the world's
financial capital for a few years now. London has. And Shanghai is emerging
pretty fast...

A friend of mine who's a grad student at a top 5 math department in the U.S.
was invited to join D.E. Shaw recently. Another friend just finished her MSc
at MIT and will take a quant position in an investment fund... in East Asia
;-) Circumstances don't look cheery for sure, but just because the U.S. is
depressed, it doesn't mean other parts of the world are equally depressed.

~~~
noaharc
I think you are factually wrong on a few points.

1) Though Obama is the legal president of the United States only, it is
trivial to see that his actions influence people in other countries.

2) It's hard to define "world's financial capital", but, by most accounts, New
York is still the front-runner. See
[http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=...](http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22financial+capital%22+world%27s)

3) The concept of decoupled economies is false. The US is actually doing
better than a lot of countries that proponents of the theory had expected to
fare well. See [http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/no-shelter-in-
thi...](http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/no-shelter-in-this-storm/)

~~~
Rod
My replies:

1) Obviously. But whatever laws are passed in the U.S. are not going to be
enforced outside the U.S. (of course). The president of the U.S. can exercize
his influence abroad but he can't exactly force other countries to do what he
wants, unless he threatens with penalties (not limited to military action),
which would help denigrate the image of the U.S. abroad even more. Obama's
administration can pass whatever laws it wants. Financial institutions will
always find a loophole to be exploited. Regulatory arbitrage works wonders...

2) Defining "world's capital" is admittedly a childish game. One possible
definition of _world's financial capital_ would be to count the number of
hedge funds in London and the number of hedge funds in NYC.

3) Of course the concept of decoupled economies is false. What I was trying to
argue is that the correlation between the American economy and other
countries' economies is not 100%.

America is still a great country, obviously. Just don't expect the post-WW2
status to last forever. Things change.

~~~
noaharc
Okay, I think I understand what you're saying. It certainly is easy to project
the geopolitical status quo infinitely into the future, and just as certainly
that is wrong. But I think financial centers shift slowly -- we've only really
seen three (London, New York, and Amsterdam) in as many centuries. Moreover,
the traditions and rules of the predecessors are often carried over to the
successors, and we can probably expect this continuity to be even stronger in
the future, given the greater degree of global interconnectedness.

So I guess what I'm saying is that it will be some time before we seen a
financial industry like that of the turn of the 21st century, no matter where
you look.

~~~
Rod
_"So I guess what I'm saying is that it will be some time before we seen a
financial industry like that of the turn of the 21st century, no matter where
you look."_

I agree. And, honestly, that could be a wonderful thing. Now that the _New
Gilded Age_ seems to be over, maybe people can cool their heads off and get
back to reality...

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rbitar
This is an old thread from around Nov 2007

~~~
TriinT
Back in Nov 2007 things were already looking quite gloomy. For instance, Bear
Stearns started to implode in June 2007.

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joe_the_user
Wow,

It makes me think of someone who once said "I used to feel sorry for myself
because I had no shoes, until I saw a man who had no feet" but in an opposite
kind of way.

Actually working half-time at an average programmers' salary sounds great -
assuming my current gig goes through. But it also sounds _so_ much better than
what these boobs were doing, during the "good times". Awesome.

------
Rod
_"While I, too, fell under the spell of Paul Graham, I refuse to drink any
more of his kool aide until he comes out with his magic language he's been
promising us for the last half decade or more. Yes, interpreted languages with
compilers and fancy debuggers are great. That doesn't mean it has to have a
bunch of parenthesis, or that you should waste your life with horrible crap
like Common Lisp. "_

I have the impression that this kind of comment will make some people's blood
boil...

~~~
TriinT
And I am certain this comment will make some people's blood boil even faster:

 _"If you want to start your own company, you don't even really need an idea,
as long as you can do stuff. I have done so myself (and am pretty happy doing
it). YC is, of course, almost completely retarded; anyone with a job and a bit
of ingenuity can provide a deeper pool of funding than that, and the
"connections" are worth zilch, based on their track record. Just save some
money."_

