Why not have an exchange that doesn’t specifically include brokers? Let anybody buy and sell, provided they’ve identified themselves and their money is deposited in the system.

You could still have brokers performing whatever duties people want to pay them for.

It would be more like a horse track. You go to the window and place your bets. You can pay as much attention to the race track touts as you want to, but you don’t have to give them your money so they can go to the window for you. (Though you can if you want to.)

Dunno if this is directed at me but since I’ve been the main one going on about banks I suspect it might be. So for the record—I’ve never said anything about you being morally compromised. I don’t suppose you are, and more to the point, I don’t think it’s a question that I ought to have an opinion on.

But! When you claim that a big role for stockbrokers follows directly from the fact of intermediation, and that there is no alternative system, or at least none that’s not strictly inferior, where stockbrokers would play a smaller role—well, that’s a public claim, not a private one, which I’d think we’re all free to debate.

But we’re not strangers! We’re both part of the big, warm, happy, communicatively-ethical CT family …

Perhaps a good stopping point was reached between post 1 and whatever this one is. 2¢; ain’t what it used to be.

Get … no, too easy. Also not going to happen, like all the other moral exhortations. No I don’t. What you had was a “reasonable expectation” – ie, you thought I would and it was reasonable of you to think that, which is why I apologised. Actually your expectation was factually wrong as I had never intended to, but you weren’t to know that before I’d told you.

This reasonable expectation on your part, though, was all you had. You don’t have the right to a blog post from me, that would be mental. Rich’s view is even more mental – he thinks that I have an obligation to rearrange my whole life and career in order to be able to make blog posts about financial subjects (despite the fact, of course, that if I didn’t do the job I do, I wouldn’t know anything like as much about the subject). Or even stronger, that everyone should avoid careers like mine (even though he himself earns his living in a way which would not be possible if nobody did jobs like mine), just in case they might find themselves in a spot where they had a conflict of interest that stopped them writing blog posts.

Get over yourselves, for Pete’s sake. This is madness. I have a genuine conflict of interest, outlined above, which is (and I think this is accepted by everyone, even Rich) a good reason for not writing about the crisis. I’m sorry that this disappointed everyone, but it came about as a result of a decision (to start a career as a stockbroker 15 years ago, and to do it well rather than badly) which was clearly mine to take. I won’t write anything about schools in the London borough of Camden either, by the way; are you guys going to tell me I shouldn’t have had kids?

All the rest is just various sorts of people trying to convince me that stockbroking is an intrinsically bad profession to belong to. Which a) it isn’t, and b) do you think I have never considered this or something? It doesn’t really surprise me that someone might want to argue that because a hypothetical bank-based system of financial intermediation might possibly have tolerable results, I am therefore specially morally compromised because of the job I do – people bullshit all the time. What does surprise me is that they then expect me to be polite and take them seriously in return. Bollocks to that.

“Get humble”. Why not spend the rest of the day lecturing random strangers on exactly how far they have fallen short of the standard of service you expected of them, then buttonhole them on the poor quality of their “non-apology apology”. See what it does for your reputation for humility. Then go and fuck yourself, obviously.

Like everyone else on the list, I adore your delicious snarky wit, except when it irritates the hell out of me. Rich’s objection—that someone with a (more or less) public platform has at least prima facie public obligations, at least during a grave crisis to whose resolution he might make his mite of a contribution —is at least plausible, and I’m certain I’m not the only person who finds your replies blustering and evasive. There are perfectly respectable answers available to you—Harry has supplied most of them; above all, that you have a living to make, like everyone else, and can probably use your ill-gotten gains to do more good than you could have done by foregoing them. But to pretend that a challenge to the ethics of your profession is simply out of bounds is simply tosh. Get humble.

The US has had 2 major traditional bank crises already, and the S&L crisis to boot. And before you blame the demon deregulation, you should note that the regulations were changed under Carter because the regulations in place were actually killing the banks in question (5% fixed mortgage for income when inflation is 10-15% equals dead bank).

It’s a good thing that I never argued against a stock market, then.

Now, onward:

I did think about my career choice, back when I was picking out a career. I followed my own advice. Telling people that they have that choice too, and should be making it, now counts as sanctimony according to Daniel.

In your case it certainly does, because the “career choice” you’re talking about is in an industry entirely parasitical on mine, viz:

Part of my work involves helping to figure out corporate pollution records for socially responsible investors, using funding sources that allow sharing of that information with anyone who wants it.

Nobody would give a stuff about those records, and there would be no such thing as “socially responsible investors”, if there were not a liquid market for tradeable claims on the ownership of corporations. This is the position of a chef who looks down on the slaughterman.

So having established that the man who puts moules farci boudin noir on the menu is in the same game as the man who sticks the pig, we can move on:

He was coming up with flimsy-sounding reasons why being a stockbroker wasn’t his choice, or at least why any other course would be equivalent

Happy to confirm that this was my choice and I like it.

If his choice of profession makes him not speak out during a public crisis about what he knows most about, there’s something wrong with it

No there isn’t, and you’ve really not offered any reason why there might be other than your bald (and rather rude) assertion. Like any other producer of intellectual property, the fact that you want me to give it away for free and under a public domain licence doesn’t actually give you the right to it. Whatever positive duties I might have, this isn’t one of them.

But the question is whether you’re only working for the upper class, or whether you’re working for everyone

No, the real question is why don’t you stick it up your jacksie? This is the typical nonprofit ego trip and it’s just wrong. I’m simply not going to apologise for doing a job I’m good at and enjoy and which is legal and produces a valuable service. If pushed, however, I certainly might start making a few pointed inquiries into the social utility of what you do, Rich, and how the money spent on funding you might be more usefully employed.

You’re willing to give Daniel credit for possibly giving away a lot of his money to charity in his life offline—but you’re unwilling to ask him—yet you’re not willing to give me credit for possibly confronting people face to face? Yeah, I think that you are posturing against sanctimony, really. Not sanctimony exactly, but the idea that it’s really possible to make the choices that it’s more comfortable to avoid.

“But he only knows most about it because its his profession”

I held Krugman up as an example. Does he only know about the economy because … wait a minute. That argument doesn’t hold up, does it? I know a whole lot about pollution databases. I’d know just as much, probably, if I had chosen to work for industry as an environmental compliance specialist. But then I couldn’t talk about it.

As for cooperation with a social democratic party, you’re ignoring the fact that Daniel’s stated ideology isn’t social democratic. Once again, you don’t have to be a right-winger, precisely, to be a neoliberal. If a social democratic party does take over, those people will cooperate enthusiastically anyways; they generally have their eye on the main chance.

“Even if not, and I did agree with this part of Daniel’s argument, the job he does produces public goods ”

That wasn’t his argument, really. What his argument came down to was

“However, in the economic system in which I actually live, people want hamburgers, Hollywood rom-coms and reasonably liquid equity markets, and therefore there is a perfectly legitimate economic role for the men and women who provide them”

People want whores, too. Maybe there’s a good argument that there is a perfectly legitimate economic role for the men and women who provide sex on demand. But if the whores can only be afforded by the upper class, is that really a public good?

Well, in the case of professors in elite universities it is just about only the upper class that we serve (even me: almost all our students come from the top 20% of income earning households, and most from the top 10%). And stockbrokers: well, I don’t know who Daniel’s clients are, and presume that he can’t divulge it. Some work for large investors, including pension funds etc, and can argue reasonably that they are working, directly, for people other than the upper class. Even if not, and I did agree with this part of Daniel’s argument, the job he does produces public goods (and, yes, public bads, but that is true of many jobs, and the question of which dominates at any given time is empirical and contingent). Again, same as my job: many of our students go onto do things which produce wider benefits than just for themselves, and the education they get here probably contributes a little bit to their ability to do that well.

I didn’t mean to bury the important point. I can’t find your list; my point though was that its wrong to look at the career choice alone; you have to look at the whole life and the way the career plays into that, and accusations in the absence of that are unfounded. And, I’ll add, without I hope posturing against sanctimony, it is unseemly to direct them against Daniel online just because he’s available, when there are so many people about whom you have ample evidence that their lives as a whole are indeed corrupt against whom I’d be surprised if you make these accusations in person.

This thread has been interesting, but I think you should quit talking about your job and stop servicing the rich and get busy on that Nader post.