We live in interesting times. The whole world’s financial system and the ’science’ of economics are being re-written, major players in the market are disappearing overnight, it’s madness. Surely this is exciting? Well, guess what. It’s not.
Not doing new deals and sitting the whole day in the office is no fun. I am running out of interesting people to go to lunch with, but it doesn’t matter because it’s always the same conversation with everyone. Even the clients are now beginning to understand that maybe something is going on and have stopped requesting meetings to introduce the next greatest project. News sites cannot provide half the entertainment value of an over-enthusiastic real estate developer, it seems. Hell, I am not even going to get fired, at least this year.
What is worse, it is not just me. Speaking with financial people all over Europe, I get the feeling they are bored to death as well. They just pretend to be scared and excited. They also follow the same pattern of lunch meetings and reading the news. Probably a certain elite minority in the major financial centers are going for days without sleep and brainstorming clever solutions to the world’s problems, but we on the fringes are not so (un)lucky.
So this is how history gets written. A long period of deadly boredom occasionally interrupted by fits of panic. Great. I can’t wait for the uninteresting times to return.
Tags: crisis
October 23, 2008 at 10:48 am
Wow. An interesting insight into the finance world during an interesting time. I was wondering how all these finance people were able to get away from work to attend mba presentations. Thanks.