Employment derivatives: Difference between revisions

{{Drop|W|hen deep into}} his annual rant about life’s meaningless viewed through the lens of his tawdry income, while yet another junior customer services manager left for a crypto startup, Hunter Barkley had an epiphany. Just as his own pay packet was an unhedged contingency apt to rain disappointment across his meagre aspirations, so was that experience common to the great, dreary sweep of humankind that clambered blearily across the clanking gears of industry.  

But that much was obvious. That was not the revelation, but this: just as the great collected horde of wage slaves were at the whims of wanton Gods, ''so too were their bosses''. Logically, they ''must'' be: the firms were on the other side of the same disspiriting trade.

Firms — particularly boring ones — were ''long'' what their servants were ''short'', only ''at far greater scale''. They bobbed ineptly at the mercy of hysteria’s fickle ebb and flow.

A single worker has but one unit measure of this risk; her master, literally, ''thousands''.  

One who deploys a turgid multitude — a good-sized bank, for example — is locked in constant struggle against those batty tides just to prevent pedestrian, but vital, operations personnel from being washed out to sea.

The foe, upon this reckoning, was those exciting but stupid enterprises propelled at any time by the prevailing delusion. ''Why'' they believed [[this time is different|things to be different]] this time scarcely mattered — there was always some hare-brained hot take to glom onto — but it often had to do with technology.<ref> Inventions like the internet, web commerce, credit derivatives, [[distributed ledger|distributed ledgers]], [[large language model|large language models]] are typical examples.</ref>

 

In any case, this employment cost volatility bore little relation to the bank’s own performance and none at all to its employees’. It was a simple measure of that background market euphoria.