Matt Levine: belief

Transcript context

…For me to restate that, why is there such extreme clustering in the finance industry, an industry where it seems we don’t need to meet each other so much? Do you think that will grow or decay? I guess it’ll decay. I worked as an investment banker. There is something in high-dollar sales about . . . people really believe in in-person meetings. I experienced it where I’d go to a meeting where a colleague would dial in, and you could tell how much better my experience was in the room than her experience was on the phone. On the one hand, to the extent that trading consists of computers trading with each other, it does seem somewhat unnecessary that we all sit within 10 blocks of each other. On the other hand, to the extent that finance is the business of M&A and of very high-dollar sales businesses, I’m not sure that it’s as amenable to fragmentation as you might think. Three rows back, this question in the middle. If you could pass the mic.…

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