Where do the smart, furtune-seeking graduates go?

The answer to this question goes in waves, according to the zeitgeist, and mirrored by the (ridiculous) starting salaries on offer.  Someone might put approximate years to these, but by my reckoning these are what we've witnessed over the past several decades, in rough chronological sequence of their peak vogue.  There's obviously overlap.

-  McKinseys and the like

-  Tech, of the NASDAQ tech-boom vintage: (various flavours during that run, but at one time B2B was the thing)

-  Investment banks

-  Green investment vehicles

-  Hedge funds

-  "Blockchain" (as a buzzword) /  crypto

-  Commodities trading (as a specific hedgie emphasis)

-  "AI" (as a buzz-phrase) / LLMs

Now, it seems, space flight has a massive vogue.  This one differs a bit, because to enter this field at least a high percentage of recruits will need to be decent engineers of one stripe or another - actual hard graft!  For some of the others, BS + "potential" were the criteria; although the ability to do Hard Sums also featured.

So - what do your bright young acquaintances all aspire after?  What is going to cream off / trendily waylay the next generation of ambitious wannabes?

ND

El Salvador goes crypto

 Already a shady place, El Salvador has decided to go all out and embrace its heritage. Rather than be a dollarised economy, it is the first large economy to declare bitcoin as its main currency. No longer will Uncle Sam's interest rate changes or weak dollar games impac El Salvador. 

So on one level this makes sense, many Central and South American countries are stuck in the dollarised trap after managing their own currencies proved too much for them and the markets. This on paper is a way out to freedom and stability. 

But Bitcoin is traded for huge gains and losses every day, it is not stable at all. So I do sense a fault in this scheme. There are still many who think it will all collapse tomorrow (then again, this is true of the Greenback too). 

El Salvador is going to be in for a helluva ride....certainly more than England, Scottish or Welsh fans over the next few weeks!

Will the EU catch an ICO cold?

One of the big bubbles in the world at the moment is the massive growth of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO's). At its heart this a business of issuing tokens that are pretending to be money. The tokens are promoted and some go up in value and some down. It is a new ear of electronic store/deletion of value.


However this past few months the Icarus phenomenon has struck, even China is thinking about cracking down on this multi-billion dollar industry. Japan this week has said it is considering next steps.


The USA has one a whole lot further, the SEC is now issuing subpoenas and demanding info from the coin offer companies.


The key issue, is that ICO's have thus far managed to sneak around  the huge regulatory barrier of the Finance sector, by only pretending to be money and in reality being software they have skated the old rulings. Of course, to their customers they are a form of money. It's very clever and of course has been exploited at length.


Finally though, now the bubble is very toppy, the regulators are getting their act together. However, noticeable is the EU and also UK, being much slower to act. yes, Mark Carney and the Bank fo England as ever are calling investors 'fools' and such like (none of us have the spectacular BOE pension fund to look forward to though, do we?), but they have not really done anything.


The EU and UK are primarily concerned about money laundering - as always their main fear is they maybe losing tax revenues somewhere. So the focus is on how transactions can be monitored and KYC checks done.


The US and others have a more fundamental approach, that is are many of the currencies even vaguely legitimate or are many of them just complex frauds to hoover up money from retail investors?


Of course, in the short term this may lead London and Frankfurt/Berlin to become crypto-central for a small while which is a decent bump to our growing FinTech industry, but we would have to question the benefits of this. London hardly needs to host yet more ways of either money laundering or ripping off people with financial scams - already it is a world beater at both.