I consider myself fairly bright - despite being involved in the finance industry (pensions) for about 25 years.

Yet I don't get all that stuff to do with futures/swaps/options - never have. I rely on economists to explain it all. I even struggle with currency movements and whether that's good or bad.

This is not like a dentist knowing nothing about teeth, my work hasn't suffered because I am piig ignorant (geddit?).

I am told that the Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson is good. One day I might read it to see if helps. Then perhaps I can join in conversations.

I would suggest not, although plenty pretend that they do.

Personally I haven't a clue... I am hoping a flash of inspiration hits me on my death bed.

World leaders,monarchs,religious heads all have advisors around them to help them understand & digest all that's going on as they need to know. Everyone is the same we only have a certain capacity for information. That's why this site works so well - it's impossible to keep up with all the matters covered in the Word let alone the world!

I'm very good on what's happening in 1958.

Well done Merv. I definitely feel the same.

And Patrick is right: plenty of people pretend they know what's going on. I suppose no-one wants to appear stupid.

It would be great if we had a big amnesty for things that we don't understand. Politics is confusing. The economy is confusing. It's all confusing.

If all the people who say they know what's going on actually KNEW what was going on, then nothing bad would ever happen because they would always know about it in advance.

You clearly aren't alone but does it matter. Why should you have more knowledge of how the economy of a banana republic is going to affect the sales of kites in Texas than you do of, say, the independent record labels in Wisconsin in the 60's? If you need to know for work you perhaps should or if you're really interested then fine. The good thing is that these days you should be able to achieve some sort of understanding of just about any matter by sitting at computer for a couple of days.

Often - usually about 3am - I feel myself in a sense of near panic about all the things that I do not know about. All the things that might happen. All the things I can't control.

On the financial front, although I do understand the very basic premise of derivatives, short-selling and the like - I'm not sure I could explain how Goldman Sachs, say, is able to make so much money from doing these things. I mean who's paying them and where are these people/institutions getting their money?

It's a comfort of sorts that actually no-one including our "leaders" know two tenths of fuck-all about anything either. Although that is not really much comfort.

It seems the internet and mobile devices and the instantness of communication means that misinformation and disinformation spread as quickly as the "truth". "News" is always portrayed in sensationalistic and reductive ways. So - now - after so many boy cried wolf scenarios - I think we have had our sense of judgment about what is serious and what is not eroded.

Control an illusion.

what's going on and more about what the implications are. I know what short selling is but until this week, had never knowingly heard of 'naked short selling' as banned by Germany. A quick trip to Wikipedia puts me straight on that, although I'm still confused about the difference between liquidity and fungibility.

However, I don't have the faintest idea about what the real impact of this might be. Or whether the €400b+ fund to support the € through the Greek crisis is enough. Or whether the eurozone really should adopt the controls proposed by Germany, which is an export led economy unlike many other EU countries. Not a clue.

but a wise man knows how little he knows.I think I'll have a little lie down now.

Absolutely.

That's how I feel most of the time. Perhaps explains why I always take the easy way out and make lame jokes about everything as some sort of defence mechanism.

What is short selling? Not, I imagine, a sale of the briefer trouser...

1) Borrow 100 shares worth £1 each from someone.
2) Sell the shares - you've got £100.
3) Wait for the shares to go down in value.
4) Buy 100 shares at 90p = £90 spent.
5) You're £10 better off than you were before you borrowed the shares.
6) Return the shares to the person you borrowed them from.

This is a simplified version; there are dealing costs and various rules but this is the basic principle.

Naked short selling is the same except you don't actually make sure you've borrowed the shares in the first place, so you're selling something you neither own nor have any title to.

And he knows that 1975 was the High Water Mark of Pop/Rock/Etc.

He knows "Smoke From a Distant Fire" by the Sanford Townsend Band is a work of sublime genius

Others know him through his munificence, his omnipotence, his Word.

He is known as The Hep.

seem to have been totally disregarded in recent years. If Quantitative Easing is so easy and doesn't cause rampant inflation how come it hasn't used before? Also as UK Plc who do we actually borrow the money from? - surely at some point we'll be told enough is enough you can't have any more.
It seems to me on a very simplistic level that there is too much "money and other financial instruments" in circulation that simply do not exist and that the entire economic system could collapse in the future.
If that's the case it may be better not to know and understand.

I have a similar background to Merv, and admire his bravery in admitting what he feels to be a weakness (although I think it is simply the way we all are, if we would only but admit it). One of the features of the current crises seems to be that economic matters had got too complex for governments and even many senior people in financial institutions to either understand or want to tackle. The 'exotic' financial instruments are a fine illustration of this state of affairs. I think the most danger arises when people who are in a position to influence such affairs become paralysed due to a lack of knowledge.

Some things I'll never really understand because I'm not really interested in them. If I feel I need to know, then I find out more.

The things I'm interested in I understand.

Does that make sense?

We can't be across everything, all the time, and surely no one expects us to be. It would be exhausting.

Relax...

If I was the last person left on the planet and aliens landed and asked me how electricity works, I wouldn't have a clue. You press a button and a light comes on - what happens in between is clearly witchcraft. I obviously need a one-to-one session with the lovely Professor Brian Cox..

However, I do understand English grammar and the offside rule.

You don't need to know

I've never met anyone high up in business who has remotely impressed me and I'm sure I haven't impressed them either.
It strikes me that if you really will yourself to know a lot about, for example, stocks and shares, over the course of no more than a week you are automatically going to be in the top 1% in the country on that subject because that subject is mind-numbingly dull and tedious.

It's like Cameron recently becoming Prime Minister.
The media declared him the cleverest politician/man of his generation.
No, wrong, he's the cleverest man of his generation who wanted (really wanted) to be Prime Minister.

I suspect that much cleverer and more interesting men are sitting up trees or are gardeners or postmen.

Everyone in the universe gets it apparently.

apart from what it's m job to understand, but what really worries me is that very few in a position of power seem to have a f****** clue about what's going on either. Sitting here staring into the abyss of possible total career/life meltdown thanks to some recent spectacularly stupid decisions by both senior management and idiot regional and national politicians it's never been clearer that this is the case. Bugger. Buen fin de semana all.

...but a good friend of mine seems to. Although he is a pessimist by nature (unusual for a stockbroker), he thinks this country is deeply fucked.

I've just come back from a radio show where one discussion suggested that there is a lot of stuff that we personally don't know or understand, there is a lot of stuff that we know about that nobody understands but there is (probably) an even greater amount of stuff that we don't even know about let alone understand.

helpful to me is the FT, a recent example of why is this:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/67ae51e2-5e35-11df-8153-00144feab49a.html

The Abbey Theatre in Dublin is an august institution. It is Ireland’s national theatre, created by William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge. Conceived more than a century ago in the heat of Ireland’s great cultural revival, an act of rebellion against English rule, its mission was “to bring upon the stage the deeper emotions of Ireland”.

That is what it plans to do next month, when it stages an unusual one-man show. Outsiders feature David McWilliams, economist, broadcaster, commentator and thorn in the paw of the Celtic Tiger. He was among the few to have spotted and called the credit and property bubbles that brought the tiger to its knees, and has pilloried and pickled the country’s political, financial and business elite in a stream of best-selling pop-economy polemics. Follow the Money is his latest, bursting with profane portraits lampooning the dramatis personae of the boom and bust who, as it were, talked themselves on to the stage. A stand-up economist is born.

“When the parliament of a country turns into a theatre, then the theatre must become the parliament,” says McWilliams, gleefully irreverent behind a shock of red hair as he sips coffee in his local café in Dalkey, south of Dublin. Excoriating Dublin’s bail-out of the banks last month, he retrieved the figure of the Gombeen – the loathed money-lenders who preyed on the peasantry after the great famine – for use against those who operate at the tawdriest intersections of politics and business. “The neo-gombeen,” McWilliams wrote in the Irish Independent, “is a traditional gombeen hiding behind the international lexicon of high finance. The neo-gombeen thinks that if he uses the language of the Financial Times, as opposed to the Skibbereen Eagle, he can get away with it.”

well up to their best standard, imo. Part of what I like is the way the paper often confounds knee-jerk expectations of what they will write about [that piece is followed by one on Germans living as Native Americans in Italy, and one on Cuban doctors.]

The other thing that helps me is triangulation-I have no reason to suppose that either of these

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7127607.ece

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-long-road-leading-to-n...

accounts is free of ConDem propaganda, but taken together I feel I've learned something. Not suggesting this isn't an obvious pov but it does at least give the illusion of knowledge ;-)

And anyway, even Noam Chomsky needs a day off now and again ;-);-)

http://www.theonion.com/articles/exhausted-noam-chomsky-just-going-to-tr...

"I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning," said the outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic, who first came to public attention with his breakthrough 1957 book Syntactic Structures. "The systems of control designed to manufacture consent among a largely ignorant public will still be there for me to worry about tomorrow. Today, I'm just going to kick back and enjoy some much-needed Noam Time."