Around the London Finance World in 4 Days
On Wednesday, fellow ex-MS intern, Saeed Amen, gave a wonderful introduction to global FX markets. Not about where any currency was going, but the insider mechanics of FX.
![Saeed looking professional Saeed looking professional](https://www.thomasbarker.com/content/images/wordpress/files/saeedamen.jpg)
Evangineer (also known as Mamading), organised HackingTheRecession on Friday, which was attended by misc. people from social media and some OpenCoin people. Although I remain very sceptical about community currency, it has made me think about justifying that properly.
Also had a (somewhat off-topic, but very interesting) talk by Vinay Gupta about how to survive a total infrastructure collapse.
The second BarCampBankLondon on Saturday (which I help organise) was a little smaller than usual as it’s Valentine’s day.
![BarCampBankLondon BarCampBankLondon](https://www.thomasbarker.com/content/images/wordpress/files/images/logobarcampbank.png)
We still managed a session on mortgage issues…
“Basel 2 works by moving the dangerous stuff to the least sophisticated triple-A counter-party where everyone can sort of forget about it.” – Me
Our financial modelling session broke into an impromptu discussion on alternative currencies and payments that stretched through lunch. Fortunately Dave Birch was there who did a lot of work on M-PESA [Kenyan money transfer system: 18 months, 5m users].
(Btw, WoW is now the financial world’s standard reference model for alternative currencies and economics!)