It has been awhile since I started this blog…actually almost a decade which is hard to believe.

I’m now building Odin River, after being CIO at Artivest and working for John Paulson at Paulson & Co. before that.

Alas, it feels like the Credit Cycle is turning again. It isn’t as clearly contracting as when this blog began, which means perhaps we are in earlier stages than last Cycle. However, there are reasons to be more concerned now. The main one being that the risks are less obvious and yet the asymmetry across the Credit Markets is perhaps more extreme given the state of the Sovereign Credit Markets today.

I’m likely going to continue to primarily blog on Medium and write on Twitter but I’m contemplating resurrecting this blog. We’ll see.

Thanks for visiting and good luck

By David A. Levine

…read more

Source: @davealevine on Medium

Yesterday was my last day at Paulson & Co. Working at the company since 2009 was an absolutely incredible experience.

It is now time for me to move on to the next adventure.

After an appropriately placed jaunt to Austin for SXSW Interactive, I am joining a start-up here in NYC named Artivest as Director of Strategy and Investing. Although it is a bit too early to discuss exactly what we are doing, it combines my passion for the Internet with my passion for the markets.

I look forward to sharing more with you in the coming months. If you would like to be closely involved please email me directly or sign up on our landing page.

I am thrilled to take this next step in the adventure.

11 years ago, I sat near the Hudson in the shadows of the World Trade Center with a great friend.

We chatted about life and debated the purpose of all of it. We were analysts in investment banking – working across the street from the towers in groups called M&A and Media & Telecom. We were young – but we thought we had it all figured out.

I stood on the edge of a wall overlooking the river yelling (it was around midnight and noone was around – I was 22):

“The world is ours!  We can be whatever we want! Like Nietzsche says – we can be the Übermensch – we can conquer it all!”

I felt on top of the world. My friend shook his head. He had other things on his mind:

“No…it is all about the Faustian bargain…all we can hope for is to find contentment. The best thing in the world is to be content.”

I thought he was weak. He thought I was a dreamer.

Two weeks later, the towers were falling. The world was shattered. We kept moving.

…

Tonight we ate steaks.

He has since graduated from law school, works for the City, and is a healthy and happy young professional. I work for a leading hedge fund after graduating with impressive-sounding degrees. We have both had many failures and some successes.

We laughed.

Only blocks away from where we stood a decade ago, it was almost unbelievable to look at the new towers and buildings (including the fancy restaurant where we ate) that didn’t exist years before.

We reconsidered our dichotomy.

At first, he claimed he still believed in the Faustian ideal – but characterized it differently:

“As long as I am learning, striving towards something and growing…I don’t need much.”

To me this sounded importantly different than contentment.

“What you want is to be out in the ocean: in the waves, with new ones coming – catching some, falling, being a part of it…and learning to ride the waves more over time.”

He agreed.

I used to think that it was all about conquering and accomplishment and being the greatest.

But in the decade that has passed, I have had so much failure and life pass by that I now realize the best we can hope for is something similar to what Nietzsche proposes but much more concrete:

We should strive for greatness – aiming high. But life happens – including travesties like 9/11 – and we find ourselves in the same place a decade later, facing similar trials and tribulations.

The world moves forward and we move forward within it – helping it to be better by being our best.

This is closer to Hegel’s idea of the Spirit realizing itself through our actions over time…

Or like my parents always told me in plain english: you should always try our best and treat others as you would like to be treated.

When we do that, we do our part to help make each day a little better than the last.

…

Before leaving, my friend asked the waiter a riddle:

“What is the greatest day ever?”

The waiter and I smiled. Waited:

“Today. Today is always the greatest day that ever was.”

I am not sure how to explain the miracle of today or all the unbelievable things that have brought us here, but I know that my friend is right about this: today is a gift.

I am lucky – and if you have found your way to this corner of the Internet chances are you are also lucky. We weren’t born sick. We got to live our young lives in carefree ways.

In elementary school, I was running races, participating in sports – having the kind of happy healthy childhood that so many kids can’t.  It is heartbreaking and unfair.

The Hole In the Wall Gang Camp is a camp that helps incredibly sick kids have a place where they can, in their words, “enjoy more than they or their parents ever thought possible”: 

“Founded by Paul Newman in 1988, and named for the secret, outlaw hiding-place from his film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp has been serving seriously ill children with a remarkably empowering away experience for more than twenty years. 

Activities include archery, mini golf, swimming, boating, fishing, horseback riding, arts and crafts, sports, theater and camping; all are designed to include every child and ensure that no child will fail.

Safety, Respect and Love guide every moment of this haven for seriously ill youngsters. In the words of one young camper, “I love it here. Sometimes you think being so sick gives you limits, but the Camp helps you try anything.” 

I am running the NYC Marathon in support of these kids.

Please help me blow past my fundraising goal to help this incredibly important cause for these kids who aren’t as lucky as we are.

Thanks in advance for clicking here to donate:  my fundraising page.

Or clicking here to learn more: About The Hole In The Wall Gang Camp.

I don’t know how to fix our educational system…

But I know we can do better.

I just finished watching Waiting for Superman (a movie you should watch if you haven’t). The punchline of the movie is something we all know well: schools in America aren’t doing a good enough job at educating our kids.

If you are reading this, chances are you were lucky enough to have been born in a good neighborhood to loving and supportive parents and likely can’t relate to the challenges that way too many of our kids face. I know I was, and I’m incredibly thankful for what was a quality public school education.

However, there are way too many people who aren’t as lucky as we were, and we owe it to them and our children to give them more.

A good education is so fundamentally important to a well-functioning society it is staggering to me that we aren’t doing better. A democracy can only function if the populous is educated – and the fundamental rights of life, liberty and happiness aren’t achievable if you can’t be an active participatant in society. That a large portion of our population is not able to do so just because of where they were born is morally repugnant.

So what should we do about it?

One starting place mentioned in the movie is that we need better teachers.

I’m not going to quote data, so disagree if you must, but there are a lot of bad teachers out there. In my opinion, truly bad teachers should be fired just like in other professions. Unfortunately, due to the power of teachers unions and concepts like tenure and seniority this is sometimes hard if not impossible. This must change. I’m not suggesting an outsider should come in with a hatchet and start firing all teachers who appear to be struggling. Clearly training and experience are necessary before one can judge performance – in any profession – but after the bad performance is clear, allowing bad teachers to stay is unacceptable.

We should also recruit and train teachers as well or better than Goldman Sachs and McKinsey recruit and train their employees. And teachers should also have the opportunity to get paid as much as they could by working in private professions. Doing so is obviously a challenge given the public nature of our educational system, but plenty of public employees get paid well (judges, elected officials etc). Given the amount of money we spend on education in this country (and on prisons for those who drop out), I think smart people can solve this problem. This would help to attract and retain smart and hard working people to an important job in our society.

What is more complicated than solving the “teacher” problem, however, is solving the “student” problem.

What I mean is that part of the reason kids drop out of school and performance drops so much when kids get into middle school has little to do with the teachers – it is about the students themselves.

Clearly one should not blame a 12 year old for a failing school. So what I mean by “student” is really more about the community and family lives of the most challenged kids in our society.

One of the problems we face in solving this issue is that it involves so much stuff – much of which is very uncomfortable and controversial.

Specifically, generational poverty, lack of role models, community structure, safe neighborhoods, peer support and other issues impacting many kids are bound up in realities of still very-challenging civil rights struggles that were only just fought by our parents’ generation.

More directly: it is not a coincidence that the “achievement gap” in our educational system usually falls along socio-economic and often racial and ethnic lines.

These topics are uncomfortable to think about and sometimes not even possible to discuss, because of the understandable pain and anger that people often feel around such issues. But like it or not, we need to face these issues head on because our kids need us to.

I’m not sure how to do that or even what I think needs to change specifically, but I do think issues of inequality are helping to perpetuate broken communities which make it hard for kids to have better lives.

I think perhaps part of it boils down to the idea that we need to provide people with more opportunities – and jobs – to allow them to be contributing members of our society.

Maybe the intellectual error we are making is in assuming that just because the older kids “dropped out” or even went to prison, that they cant have a chance for a good life.

Maybe if we used some of the entrepreneurial spirit that is currently frothing the angel and VC markets to tackle this issue, we could create business models and alternative career paths that would help give jobs to people currently without hope or dignity … who are in situations where selling drugs is sometimes the most economically rational career path.

This would be difficult because they lack “skills,” but given how powerful and easy to use devices like iPads and the like are, perhaps we could figure out businesses and jobs that leveraged these aspects of the devices to allow currently-disenfranchised people to contribute to society. I have no really concrete idea how this might work, but it just seems like we have a lot of people out there who need jobs and if we could figure out a way to harness them it would kill two birds with one stone.

I’m not sure if this is right, but it does seem that helping communities is likely a mandatory component of any truly comprehensive “reform” program.

Other ideas on the “student” side of the equation are more straightforward – mentorship is one. And providing kids with knowledge of their options is another.

For awhile I’ve noodled with the idea of building a site where people would talk about their career paths in an open format so kids could see what possibilities were out there – think of it like an “open” informational interview site, or an “open” Linked-In, where kids could just see what paths are available to them. I think if you give kids the power to dream and a path to look forward to, it might help.

Who knows if I’ll ever build that or if it is even a good idea but maybe it will serve as food for thought for somebody out there…

I’m not sure how to fix education.

But I do know we can do better and that we absolutely must.

Please let me know if you have any silver bullets.

It seems to me like the nature of text and reading is changing…

The other day, a friend of mine at work remarked about the fact that we no longer “read” that much. The comment came up in the context of discussing a recent book that none of us had read.

I disagreed with her. I actually think I read more today than ever before.
However, rather than sitting in a library plowing through a pile of dusty old philosophy books trying to weave together a thesis on epistemology with old words, today, I read hundreds of 140-character snippets from people I follow on Twitter, while bouncing back and forth to “web pages” of news articles from various different news sources. At work, I toggle between browsers and bloomberg and print out research reports, half of which end up half-read in piles on my desk.

What this means to me is not that we are reading less, but rather that if (this might be a big if) my behavior is any indication of how people will consume content in the future, we might even read more content just in different forms.

This leads me to believe that new genres of text-based creativity should emerge – and likely are already emerging – as we use new tools and interfaces to consume the data we consume.

One of the frustrating elements I find – and part of the reason I find myself “blogging” less – is that although Apple makes phenomenal content-consumption devices, my iPhone and iPad aren’t great for creating text-based stuff. I also think voice-to-text might not be the right answer either – typing and writing words on a page are different than speaking them – the cycles of feedback to the visual-input-system (eyes) make the creative process work better than the auditory one.

Maybe this means that people will make better and different adaptors for my Apple devices, or maybe we’ll come up with a new form of text that better comports with our content-creation devices. Or more likely, my frustrations might be unique to me. Maybe things will remain the same.

Either way, it is fun to think about this stuff sometimes. We are almost in the second-decade of the twenty-first century. The future might be here soon…

It has been a long time since I have written here, but recently I have felt compelled to rejoin the discussion “out here” in the Internets.

The primary reason why I feel like I need to start writing again is because I am frankly starting to get annoyed and tired with all the pessimism that I read in the newspapers and in the “financial” oriented blogs out there.

We need to quit harping on all the negative data out there and start realizing that there are many positive things going on in the world and our economy – and here is why:

First, one of the few truths is that the future does not yet exist.

No matter how much we think we can predict what is going to happen tomorrow (some of us even make a living out of trying to do it), we can’t. It is impossible.

Besides the physics of it, when it comes to things like the “economy” or the “markets”, the reason it is so hard to figure out what is going to happen is because the result is arrived at through a combination of a bunch of individual human beings making decisions about a lot of different stuff. Economists think they can model this behavior and figure out what is going to happen based on theories and math. They can’t. No one can.

Part of the reason this task is so hard is because we are collectively creating a new future each day when we walk out the door and into the world. Now sure there are certain social constructs which are in the background and seem like they are impossible to change – stuff like the concept of ownership, citizenship, relationships and things of that nature – but a lot of what we make out every day depends on our perspective.

For example, when you come to work well rested and in an upbeat mood, you are far more likely to get along with your co-workers than if you are tired, sick and angry. Doing so will make you more productive and allow you to do more stuff. If you do more, your company will do better, make more money and all the sudden you have impacted the economy in a positive way.
The point of this example is that we can influence how things unfold in our lives in a major way just by changing out point of view in little ways.  Because of this, it is difficult to predict how things are going to unfold because this and many other factors about how people are going to act tomorrow can’t be determined a priori. We are humans, not atoms.

Second, the markets are even harder to predict than the future and they are influenced directly by our perceptions.
Anyone who has sat in front of a Bloomberg terminal can tell you that it feels very different when there is “green” on the screen than when there is “red” on the screen. When things seem positive, you feel and act differently and vice versa. This is true not only for price movements but also for the interpretation of economic data.
Last quarter’s GDP result is a great example of this. Few people talked about how net exports were a big impact on the total GDP number (they were up a lot in the last quarter), but that actually shows that we are doing a lot more consuming now than we were earlier in the year. We can argue all we want about whether our consumption-based economy is a good thing, but the reality is 70% or so of our GDP is consumption based. Although buying stuff from abroad isn’t necessarily that great for our local economy, it is a good indicator of the fact that people are consuming again.

I don’t know what that means in the greater scheme of things, but I do know that I am not reading much in terms of positive interpretations of the data that are coming out of late. Most of the headlines and press I have seen over the last few months has been harping on the legitimate concerns that people have.
This is bad because of the above mentioned fact that we influence our world everyday with our perspective and this effect is amplified in the context of the markets. The more negative we interpret stuff, the harder it is for stuff to get better – and the worse things could potentially become.

Many of my more “bearish” friends talk about the mistakes we made in the first half of the last decade by spending and borrowing too much. I think they have a point, but the pain we suffered over the last couple years was enough of a lesson – we get it, housing prices can go down and we have to think about that and other risks more in the future. But this backwards-looking analysis and bearishness that is now in style is getting old. It is time to start looking forward again. 

I am positive that America’s and the world’s better days are ahead of us. We need to stop harping on all the mistakes we have made over the last few years and get out of our own way to let us get there. 

In the past, when we looked back on historical events, we were able to decipher correlation from causation after the fact…but those with military, political, or social power controlled the interpretation that became widely known.

This power to determine history, in the short or even longer term, was made weaker by the invention of the printing press and later newspapers.

Now that we have digital media and any one of us can voice an opinion for others to hear, perhaps we will get closer to an ideal world where something approaching truth will emerge for our collective interpretation of past events.

A cynic might say that the masses will be more easily swayed by sentiment or the power of manipulative rhetoric, but it has been my experience that most people are smarter than we give them credit for and often they are limited by their linguistic training.

As our tools of digital interaction, translation and sharing continue to increase, I am excited about the potential for us to enter a more truly democratic world, where we learn from our past through a process of sharing, interpretation and learning through increasingly rapid cycles of feedback.

Perhaps through this process we will not only learn more about our past, but we might even be able to learn more about each other and eliminate some of the fears and misunderstandings that drive much of the negativity and violence that still unfortunately plagues our world.