Holy shit. 41x! I'm in the wrong world. Even though I'm in the overpaid-programmer-industrial-complex, in an expensive west coast town with an expensive million dollar house and expensive taxes, I can't imagine what it would take to get into evil and profitable investment vehicles like these hedge funds. I just have no exposure to that world.
I'm curious - why do you call the hedge fund world evil? I hear this quite often but where does it come from?
I've worked in both a hedge fund and in tech, and I found the former to be less evil and pretentious. People in finance think and say "I want to make a ton of money" while people in tech say "I want to save the world" while thinking "I want to make a ton of money" - resulting in misaligned incentives and imposter syndrome everywhere.
Whereas a monetary system is an essential aspect of modern civilization many people see major players in our specific system obviously working against the interests of the rest of civilization instead of simply enabling it. It's obvious that not everyone is equally bad or equally culpable but its obvious that there is also an institutional lack of what most people think of as ethics.
Take for example the creation of a market to manipulate the price of commodities most notably wheat.
Sachs is most likely mostly responsible for millions perhaps hundreds of millions of people going hungry and yet a response to outlawing this kind of manipulation provokes this response.
>I asked a handful of wheat brokers what would happen if the U.S. government simply outlawed long–only trading in food commodities for investment banks. Their reaction: laughter. One phone call to a bona-fide hedger like Cargill or Archer Daniels Midland and one secret swap of assets, and a bank’s stake in the futures market is indistinguishable from that of an international wheat buyer. What if the government outlawed all long-only derivative products, I asked? Once again, laughter. Problem solved with another phone call, this time to a trading office in London or Hong Kong; the new food derivative markets have reached supranational proportions, beyond the reach of sovereign law.
This is Bond villain proportions of villainy. We could of course continue in the same vein touching on Banks laundering money for cartels, the housing market collapse, and on and on and on.
Other people answered you well, but I could sum it up as financialization doesn't help society. It puts up barriers to free trade, monopolizes businesses, adds rentier like barriers to society. A great financial system also makes it easier to get a loan, invest in things, get credit. For wealthy or fortunate people like most programmers this is all great. For poorer people it adds to the tax or drudgery and difficulty of having a good life and affording it.
> while people in tech say "I want to save the world" while thinking "I want to make a ton of money"
Citation needed. The number of people in "tech" who say that is remarkably low -- in my experience in Silicon Valley: zero.
Far more often, I hear employees who are driven by "the mission" of the company/product. I work on a newer generation cybersecurity product because the ones that exist in the space have terrible usability and probably aren't very accurate/comprehensive/ergonomic. I'm not "saving the world", but I am making marginal improvements in a high impact space.
Personally I haven't the foggiest idea of what a Hedge Fund actually is. I've seen The Big Short, Margin Call, Barbarians at the Gate and I don't find myself sympathetic with any of those characters (except the Ben Rickert[1] in The Big Short, but only because he saw how terrible the industry was and got out years before the story takes place).
> I hear this quite often but where does it come from?
A part of it might be stereotypes and depictions in pop-culture. The drama Billions shows hedge funds getting their consistent edge from insider info. Not sure how true that is but for people outside the industry that doesn't come off as a good look.
