by Eileen 配仪

Libor Scandal

I took out “The Spider Network” from the e-library. (Now that real estate is so costly, I no longer buy books.) The problem is that the Libor is so easily manipulated is surprising to me. I suppose it was one of those things that everyone assumes that it is impossible to collude all the time to fix the rate. Once in a rare blue moon, shit happens.

The People, post GFC, wanted banks to be punished for wrong-doings. So politicians, regulators and the judiciary came after Tom Hayes and locked him away for 14 years. (Hayes was also conveniently unlikeable.)

I feel sorry for Hayes. He reminded me of a poor dauphine in The Lost King Of France. Yes, in fixing the Libor, he impacted the loans, the hedging, and the returns of pension funds over the period of time that he and others were involved in manipulating the rates. But why is the Libor so easily manipulated in the first place?

by Eileen 配仪

Clearing Old Emails

My reading habits, my writing style, my occasional gloom, my curiosity, my little pats on the back, my long (pointless) conversations about things that annoy me, my childishness, my curiosity and friendliness to strangers on the internet, my hoarding of chat history, random chats with old timer bloggers. Nothing has changed. The blog address did change however.

Husband of mine asked to read my blog – I didn’t know that he didn’t know that I’ve got one. I just have too much mental meanderings written down everywhere – notes, email diaries, paper diaries, learning journals, work diaries, mentoring diaries. What a huge mess to get rid off when I am off from this realm. Do I delete them all now? I did purge all diaries once and regret it occasionally, although I am unsure what it is that I regret.

by Eileen 配仪

INTP self care

Last Sunday, I managed to spend time alone in the library reading. The Sunday before last, I had a few hours and drew a bird from a library book.

This charge drained by Monday. By the end of Tues I am exhausted by the idea of going into work on Wednesday.

I need a rest.

by Eileen 配仪

Wirecard – is it really fraud?

From a industry perspective, grey areas will need regulatory authority to step in and issue guidance. Where there is absence of guidance, there is no need for a firm to shy away from grey areas.

In New Yorker’s March 2023 edition, Ben Taub tried to build his story of Wirecard by calling out several legally permitted moves as sketchy: the reverse takeover, buying over a small German bank, the rule skirting that allowed Wirecard to expand it’s business or even regulatory arbitrage. In this instance, there is where is the seed of doubt?  His suggestion that these moves allow the firm to hide from regulatory glare weak because even legal moves like these require approval by regulatory or corp governance bodies. The cooking of books story is mainly the question of where is the cash if there is so much profit. If there is no cash, the profit must be faked is the reasoning.

The crime suggested later in the article is money laundering. Yet for this, there is nothing more than a suggestion of Russian involvement. Money laundering means real money flows as well as a real crime behind the flows. Other than hiding their revenue behind miscoding (to avoid a business contractual obligation), creating product lines that could lead to money laundering uses, there is no  investigation of the money flows. But this is the difficulty of money laundering investigation. It is impossible to catch someone who is extremely good at it. I speculate that there is real money involved but perhaps for every dollar of real money, there is a good size of dirty money that needed to be used up and this is the incentive to make the money disappear from the books.

Nobody likes short sellers and there are unscrupulous firms who publish research reports claiming to have evidence of financial mismanagement. This is a real threat for large blue chip firms who may be attacked by short sellers. Most exchanges have curtailed shorting activities.

To go after them thug style is the most telling that they are thugs. It seems to me that there is a money laundering concern that is known perhaps to everybody.   Perhaps investigators lack evidence to catch Wirecard. However, they  enough evidence to get the management for something – that something is fraud.

 Aside: This fawning of the US on New Yorker made me chuckle: “In finance, globally, you have a situation where the only effective police are the Americans.” Cash flows across geographies in seconds and amounts may split and co-mingle with legitmate money to avoid notice. To stop flows, to catch money laundering in action requires international cooporation which is difficult to priortise especially if domestic concerns are headlines. There is no superhero who can single handedly stop money laundering or the criminal activity that generates the money. Why this brown-nosing, I wonder.

by Eileen 配仪

Climb Another Mountain

Janice Koh’s very wise husband said to her, “We Have so many other mountains to climb. Why do we feel the need to keep going back to this one mountain?”

At #DellMentorConnect (thank you, Boss!) I introduced myself as someone who took useless degrees. Unlike the other ladies, I never used what I read in school. Why do I do it then? I’m bad at it. I don’t enjoy doing something mentally difficult. It is for me, climbing mental mountains.

But being at the summit – the view, the high. It’s a lot of effort and money spent for only a little joy that fades with the downward climb.

by Eileen 配仪

   Pick Me!

It was not enough that some colleagues said they really loved my idea. It was not enough that the beneficiary also agreed it was interesting.

I despised the word interesting. A horrid word that looks like a compliment. She is such an interesting person! (Too bad, she looks like that.)

Too many times, too many times.

It was neccessary that mine was picked.

by Eileen 配仪

My glass slippers

Not many shoes fit me. Only two brands have never given me any problems. I owned two pairs of black Ferragamo’s Aubrey shoes a long time ago but never kept up with the ownership after they broke.

I own some flats which I leave under the work table. I wear sneakers and change into the flats if there are meetings to go to. Before the sneakers, it was vibram 5 fingers. An ex CEO use to be rather bothered by them. Being the perfect gentleman that he is, other than polite inquiries about their comfort he never said anything else.