The "why" is a mystery. I do not have that answer.
The "how" goes back to the heady "dot-com" era of the late 90s. The country sold itself on a bill of goods that the Internet heralded a "new economy." The president of the integration/internet service provider company I worked for at the time actually told everyone in a company meeting th…
The "why" is a mystery. I do not have that answer.
The "how" goes back to the heady "dot-com" era of the late 90s. The country sold itself on a bill of goods that the Internet heralded a "new economy." The president of the integration/internet service provider company I worked for at the time actually told everyone in a company meeting that businesses were not evaluated by profit and loss metrics, but by how many users they had, subscriber counts, and a whole bunch of other nonsense. A couple of co-workers asked my take on that and I told them the company was headed for bankrupcty if the folks in the C-suite really believed that.
About six months later things fell apart and the company spiraled into bankruptcy.
People have a marvelous capacity for self-delusion and the meritocratic "elites" of Wall Street persuaded themselves that what they were doing really was different.
And it isn't. A business today is functionally no different than one in the 1950s, or the 1890s. When you strip away the fancy tech screens, gadgets, doohickeys, and doomaflatcheys, most companies are run in about the same fashion as one in the 1950s or in the 1890s. There's a lot less "modern" in the "modern world" than most people want to admit.
But people prize difference in their possessions as much as they prize conformity in their peers. We want things to be different. Hell, I want to believe All Facts Matter is different from every other Substack!
As it goes in Ecclesiastes 1:2 -- "All is Vanity".
And nowhere is that more true than on Wall Street!
The "why" is a mystery. I do not have that answer.
The "how" goes back to the heady "dot-com" era of the late 90s. The country sold itself on a bill of goods that the Internet heralded a "new economy." The president of the integration/internet service provider company I worked for at the time actually told everyone in a company meeting that businesses were not evaluated by profit and loss metrics, but by how many users they had, subscriber counts, and a whole bunch of other nonsense. A couple of co-workers asked my take on that and I told them the company was headed for bankrupcty if the folks in the C-suite really believed that.
About six months later things fell apart and the company spiraled into bankruptcy.
People have a marvelous capacity for self-delusion and the meritocratic "elites" of Wall Street persuaded themselves that what they were doing really was different.
And it isn't. A business today is functionally no different than one in the 1950s, or the 1890s. When you strip away the fancy tech screens, gadgets, doohickeys, and doomaflatcheys, most companies are run in about the same fashion as one in the 1950s or in the 1890s. There's a lot less "modern" in the "modern world" than most people want to admit.
But people prize difference in their possessions as much as they prize conformity in their peers. We want things to be different. Hell, I want to believe All Facts Matter is different from every other Substack!
As it goes in Ecclesiastes 1:2 -- "All is Vanity".
And nowhere is that more true than on Wall Street!