Treating 'myopia'

I realised that ever since I left university and started working, I lost grip on current affairs and general knowledge. All I had managed to get were some local news in Singapore, which were not exactly exciting (e.g. murder cases involving a foreign maid, the latest mall opening, etc.). Time was also a factor. Work was hectic. In fact, work was robbing my life. What good is work taking up all your precious hours when you could have used it wisely to acquire knowledge. Even if you don’t intend to invest your time, you could have at least use it for pleasure. The problem exists among many workacolholic Asians. On hindsight, it was such a waste to spend more than the optimal 8 hours at work as I have observed the diminishing marginal returns on productivity.

What I really yearned to do when I missed my personal time was reading and acquiring general or technical knowledge. I have always wondered how much can I learn. I often said to myself, if only I could understand how this complex universe of financial system actually works. How did banks and markets come about ? How do we get ourselves in financial crises ? What are the dynamics of all possible financial instruments in this giant universe ?

When you work in a financial sector, your participation probably involve only 1% of the whole system. Your knowledge base and state of mind become so limited that you become myopic. Very often, friends from outside of the financial sector ask you what you think of this and that, and especially the crisis. I think that most of us (including myself) who deal with so many narrow tasks at work, shamelessly not having much real contributions to the discussion. We could offer our two cents but it’s all speculation. How worthy is our opinion then ?

I can’t emphasise enough that we should read, especially now that we have super access to the vast web of information on the internet. The problem is, there’s too much information. It can be quite overwhelming, really. To my surprise, there exists many discussion papers on financial crises. Both the practitioners and academia have rather interesting opinions and findings from the past and recent events. I find that particularly useful to understand the mechanism of banks and why it is susceptible to failures. So, are these informations relevant to a layman ? I would say yes, if you are curious in the matter. Some of the models proposed in academic papers can appear to be intimidating. If you find that so, try to get as much from the introduction and the conclusion.