Behind Enemy Lines? Profiling the Occupy Movement
By Attain Capital
It’s hard to work in finance and ignore the Occupy movements. In Chicago, the participants march past our offices on a regular basis. The whispers and rumors of some of the supposed policy proposals could have wide-sweeping consequences for the financial sector as a whole if realized. Much of the press and government have expressed confusion over what, exactly, they’re trying to do. Even in our own offices, opinion on the occupations is divided.
Ambiguous, wide reaching and controversial, what started as Occupy Wall Street has become a worldwide movement, with OccupyTogether.org reporting 118 confirmed occupations globally- many of which are U.S-based. Critics have argued that the movement is a form of class warfare comprised of hippies, anarchists and socialists, but with the numbers of supporters online and at the occupations themselves increasing daily, there comes a point where it doesn’t do us any good to pretend this isn’t happening. There comes a point where we need to understand what’s happening, and why.
The general reaction of the finance world (with notable exceptions like Soros and Bernanke) has been to dismiss the protests as a temporary annoyance, but if you read our blog, you know we rarely take anyone’s word for anything. In true Attain fashion, we decided to research the Occupy movement ourselves. After extensive reading, interviews and several trips down to the Occupy Chicago events themselves, here’s what we found.
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October 14th, 2011 at 4:50 pm
It’s all about “The Attack of the Killer Algorithms” and deceptive math, hell I used to write code and know how it could be done and put in layers. The average person has no clue though on the technology end of it but IT infrastructure system run it all today and nothing happens until the algos are adjusted.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2011/10/occupying-wall-streetits-all-about.html
As far as Bernanke, read this piece of satire, would he be playing the Dumb Down game that Aetna wants their members to play to know more about their health, of course not but this is how bad the marketing is out there and how it dumbs down society. Bernanke was just a good choice to make a point. It you keep folks playing games you can scrape data, sell data and keep writing “marketing” algos that are focus on driving sales of software and not real information. How many hedge fund managers would buy in to this… It insults my intelligence for sure.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2011/10/insurer-software-games-continue-to-dumb.html