I Thought This Was America
The Weekend Beat is here! Today, nobody wants to be an accountant, and a decent crypto-con book recommendation.
Welcome to the Weekend Beat, a more wide-ranging survey of trending news topics, finance and otherwise. Cheers!
Making Drudgery Fun
There’s a general rule in markets that if you can identify a trough, it’s a good time to buy, while if you can identify a peak, it’s a good time to sell. One interesting thing over the years that I’ve noticed is that this rule tends to apply to professions as well.
For example, in the mid-2000s, a piece in Air & Space Forces Magazine ran with the headline “The Pilot Shortage Abruptly Ends.” Given that the Air Force’s ability to source pilots is roughly congruent with commercial aviation’s ability, this was a big deal. Peak!
Today, we are dealing with a severe pilot shortage. Trough!
More hilariously, who can forget the class action suit from a cohort of law school students brought against their school for allegedly misleading them about the prospects for employment among gradation?
Peak!
Today, people are fretting over a potential ‘cliff’ in law school enrollment.
Trough!
The latest career-trough piece comes from the Wall Street Journal, and it’s all about the most boring people you know: accountants.
The lack of enrollment in accounting for students seems to baffle a number of seasoned professionals, who ponder the mystery of why students would forgo endless discussion of net operating losses, joint-venture accounting treatments, and the like for the world of, say, marketing. Real mystery.
Jests aside, accounting is, well, pretty important overall—the profession isn’t dying, it’s just failed to keep up with graduate expectations, which are totally legitimate. Who would want to spend 13-hour days assembling corporate tax returns for an inflation-adjusted average salary that has fallen since 2017?
At any rate, if history is a reliable guide then it’s probably a safe bet to say that accountancy will soon enjoy a heyday renaissance, where promises of high entry-level pay for graduates begin to call to nerds wearing pocket protectors around pocket protectors like days of yore.
Other News
The Big Con
Michael Lewis is getting some surprisingly unfavorable looks for his new book, “Going Infinite,” which chronicles the rise and fall of none other than the master crypto-con himself, Sam Bankman-Fried. Appearing to cast a more sympathetic eye towards this Madoff-level thief is apparently not a good look, even for an esteemed author such as himself. A much better book, I would argue, is “Number Go Up” by Zeke Faux (no, not pronounced Faux, but Fox). I’m reading it now, as an aside, and I have to say that, even by crypto’s ridiculous standards, it’s pretty wild what these guys (almost) pulled off.
This Is Fine
Turkey is taking over command of the NATO operation in Kosovo. This is kind of a tough time to conduct a delicate military transition because, well, the Serbs and the Albanians in the region kind of aren’t getting along right now, and the Serbs, generally speaking, have the backing of a certain autocrat with a penchant for invading other countries at even the slightest fabricated provocation. I’m sure it will all be fine, it’s not as though the region has been a tinderbox for global conflict before or anything.
We Can’t Have Nice Things
CNBC writes that cities are stuck in a doom loop, and it’s very real. Honestly, it’s disgusting. So, what, you’re telling me that we can’t splurge on public amenities for years and years without raising taxes and then expect that we’ll always have enough cash to cover the costs of these ever-bloating city budgets? And that we’ll have to RAISE TAXES to fix it? What is this, Russia?
Every day it becomes more clear that Mayor Quimby was absolutely, spot-on right when he declared the citizens of Springfield (and, by extension, the world) to be nothing more than a pack fickle mush-heads.