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.

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.

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!)