Hoo-ray its payday today
Week 05 is from Monday, February 1, 2021 until (and including) Sunday, February 7, 2021.
Welcome to episode 2.
The days of our lives
Like sands in the hourglass…
Hooray, it’s pay-day today
It’s bonus month so we look at the age-old question of compensation — what is it, why do we euphemise it so, is it fair, is a secretive, furtive, eat-what-you-kill spoil of shareholder funds really the best way of motivating a bunch of agents who are meant to be pulling together into a collegiate in joint service of the very shareholders’ funds we find them arguing over — TED talker Daniel Pink has some ideas about that — and what does this, and the byzantine gymnastics our employers go through to ensure it’s all dished out fairly tell us about the fact that, as far as anyone can tell, it isn’t?
JC Articles: Compensation — The Glucksberg candle problem
GameStop, hindsight, and a 19th Century Viennese concert disaster
We still can’t stop thinking about that rabble of rowdy Redditors. This week we ask what it has to say about how we deal with, diagnose and remediate emergent risks. With 20:20 hindsight is how. We go all metaphorical and re-imagine a disastrous Austrian concert in 1808 that wound up reshaping the world.
JC Articles: Hindsight — Proactive — Emergence
A new Horcrux
While we’re on the topic, like any rent in the space-time continuum, the Gamestop farrago has briefly thrown open the window to usually-suppressed magical forces, and for the first time since 2008, there is a new Horcrux in town. We went all mixed-metaphorical with it, mashing up Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Thus Spake Zarathustra and Game of Thrones to make a rather tenuous point. If it is half as fun to read as it was to write, it is worth a look.
JC Article: Horcrux
Anyone else pining for the alps?
It’s all frightfully bourgeois, I know, but we’re pining for the mountains. It’s the time of year where we usually chase away the winter blues in on the pistes of the Bernese Oberland. We can’t be there, but our roving correspondent Godfrey Morgan has been pretending for us in North London and has filed a report. Elsewhere, in the theatre of our minds, we’ve travelled there anyway, powered only by a flaky metaphor, to understand why we should learn to love the off-piste — even those who can’t abide skiing.
JC Articles: Off-piste — Godfrey’s North London Ski Training Video
Spod’s corner
Zip up your anorak and let’s go
How prime brokers get paid
With all the GameStop excitement, we had another quick look at the underbelly of prime brokerage: how the prime broker gets paid. Contrary to the weight of opinion amongst the buy-side legal eagles, it isn’t by trading against the client: prime brokerage is a financing business, first and foremost, and being profitable is all about optimising your financing costs.
JC Articles: PB charging — Margin lending
Why you should take responsibility for your lawyers
Or, how not to poke a stick in your client’s eye on your first date. From the behavioural psychology files, a cautionary tale about how to generate friction with your client before you even trade: refuse responsibility should your professional advisers breach its confidence. We have three reasons why you needn’t blow all your marital capital on this one point on day one.
JC Articles: Professional Advisers — Confidentiality agreement
Book club highlights
Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us tells us more about the Candle Problem and what motivates, and does not, collegiate employees.
Harry Markopolos’ extraordinary No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller: the first-person account of the man who shopped Bernie Madoff to the SEC … three years before Madoff finally imploded. And do you think they listened? I won’t spoil it — but the title’s a bit of a giveaway.
Odds and Sods
Can’t get you out of my head
The news that Adam Curtis has another one of his rambling but completely engrossing documentary series coming out on the Beeb puts us in mind of Ben Woodhams’ excellent, and very funny corrective: “The Loving Trap”. In ten years it has reached an outrageously paltry 286,000 YouTube views — more, though, than the “200,000 guardian readers watching BBC2 who thought they could change the world” — so I guess Ben should be happy enough. Hopefully, we can give it a few more.
This week’s playlist
This week we’ve been mostly listening to… Sacred (and some profane) choral music! Top stuff for concentration!
Some highlights:
წინწყარო — Tsintsqaro
Werner Herzog fans may recognise it from Nosferatu. Kate Bush is a Herzog fan: she sampled it on her Hello Earth; you might recognise it from there.
Here, it is performed by Hamlet Gonashvili. With its haunting, other-worldly Georgian harmonies it sounds like a one-way voyage into the dark depths of a human soul, but apparently, is just a folk song about a trip to the local watering hole!
“I walked by the spring. There I met a beautiful girl. On her shoulder, she bore a pitcher. I spoke to her: it angered her, and she walked away.”
Beethoven — Creation’s Hymn
As the Six-Nations Championship approaches we have Morriston Orpheus, the Welsh male-voice choir, with a rousing recording of Beethoven’s great, thunderous Creation’s Hymn. The muscular sevenths are enough to put bubbles in your blood. This is a rarely performed piece: I have no idea why.
Allegri — Miserere
The story behind Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere is one of the great tales in the history of music. Allegri wrote it in 1638 for two choirs to sing to each other, in a call-and-response, coming together to end in nine-part polyphony. The breath-taking solo treble, soaring high into the vaulted Gods of the chapel, is one of the most exquisite lines in all music. Indeed, Pope Urban VIII found it so beautiful that he declared it must only be performed in the Sistine Chapel during the Tenebrae services in Holy Week, on pain of ex-communication, should anyone else so much as try.
So it was that the music was locked away for a century-and-a-half until, in 1770, a fourteen-year-old Austrian boy, visiting Rome during Holy Week with his folks, heard it once and transcribed the whole thing — all nine parts — from memory, perfectly. Happily, then-incumbent Pope Clement XIV was disinclined to ex-communicate the youngster, and instead awarded him the Chivalric Order of the Golden Spur for his genius, and Allegri’s music became the world’s, forever.
What became of the fourteen-year-old boy? Well, he went on to compose one or two nice tunes himself, as it happens. You may have heard of him: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
And finally…
Well, here was I thinking the newsletter was done until the incandescent bit of cinema verité that is the proceedings of the Handforth Parish Council Planning & Environment Committee’s December Zoom meeting dropped on YouTube.
It has everything: points of order, passive aggression, active aggression, micro-aggression, macro-aggression, technological ineptitude (IAN YOU’RE ON MUTE), apparently despotic acts of media manipulation, random members of the public invited in while the actual chair and vice-chairman are excluded and then, at minute 17:00, the acting, usurping chairman asks the fateful question that surely he must now regret: “Can we make this recording available? Of the Zoom meeting?” […] “It might be interesting for other parties on the council to hear it.”
Another man remarks, “I think if this goes viral on the internet or whatever it’s going to start a war of words.”
YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN.
Look, if you can make it to David Allen Green’s Law & Policy Blog, you can make it anywhere.
That’s a wrap
Pass it forward
That’s all for this week. The best way of encouraging the JC to stick at it is to encourage more people to sign up: if you liked this, feel free to tell your friends, share it and so on.
If you didn’t, feel free to tell me!
Be careful out there, folks, & have a nice week.
Olly
Disclaimer
Well, we couldn’t let you off without a disclaimer, could we? These are personal opinions, largely uninformed, and some aren’t even genuinely held — couldn’t be, by a reflexive individual, even if I wanted to — and you should treat them as apocryphal, sarcastic, needlessly provocative, or just pathetic. This newsletter is designed to be entertainment not information: and that’s my entertainment, not yours, by the way, as you will discover if you read ir. The JC doesn’t actively invest in the equity markets but prefers to rent seek off the backs of those fools who do. Trolling-as-a-Service, we call it.