Jay - you left out the guys who can
1. Work out currency exchange transactions in their head;
2. Work out option strategies in their head;
3. Do 1&2 simultaneously, while eating a sandwich and thinking about sex, or mulling over where to go on vacation.
In other words, all the bright boys and girls who should be gainfully employed doing rocket science for NMD here in the US, have been forced to lower themselves and go to work for various financial houses, figuring out how to make synthetic currency out of a combination of puts and calls plus borrowing and lending.
That synthetic currency is crackling through huge fiber optic cables, courtesy here in the US of the US Department of Defense which, in its infinite wisdom, decided to build the Internet, and worldwide of the various telecom companies, which decided to commit suicide, apparently.
The switches are off-shore banks which may not really have a physical structure, or may only be a virtual representation in cyberspace, but it doesn't really matter. Banks don't need vaults anymore because the money never stays put.
Around and around and around the synthetic money goes, at the same time that all the knowledge in the world goes around and around and around, at the command of all the world that knows how to tap in.
What no one anticipated is that there is no way to make money when everything is known - you can only profit from discontinuity, from arbitrage, from knowing something no one else knows.
And so, with more or less difficulty depending on who you are, we say goodbye to making money from knowing something that the next guy doesn't, and learn to adapt to a world where everything is known. Or learn to know things that someone else doesn't know yet - as always, a very few will be able to do that.
But the middlemen are going to get slaughtered until they find a new line of work. By middlemen, I include large corporations, which exist, primarily, to intermediate between inventors and consumers, buying patents dirt cheap and adding little of value, just layers upon layers of vice presidents and HR departments.
There's where the earnings are going. Large corporations are going to get slaughtered until they figure out how to ditch the middlemen - now that's going to be a spectacle right up there with the death of the dinosaurs. |
