He understands that Americans will root for rich men only as long as rich men seem to have a rooting interest in America.

By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”.

The most innovative product for a financial firm is one that always has volume and, sometimes, always has volatility. Many investors would prefer neither, they would prefer their investments boring. So there’s a clash here.

Similar sentiments were what I gathered from my reading of The Big Short by Michael Lewis. While there was a lot of common sense ignored in some of the large investment firms, it seems that the more transactions you can skim fees off of the better (if you’re a banker) and little thought was placed on the outcome or the quality of investment vehicle.

To me, I take the Warren Buffett philosophy on investing when I think of finance; it should be boring.

One other “money” product to consider is Square, the mobile phone add-on device that allows anyone to take credit card payments on their phone. What’s interesting about Square and BankSimple is that both are founded by early Twitter employees.

Read Pioneering Portfolio Management and you see very quickly that his approach calls for constant thinking and retesting of assumptions and changing of allocations

Actually, shouldn’t our approach to life follow this theory?

One of the fundamental assumptions about the free market (itself a mathematical model, not reality, but one that reality can be measured against) is that all information is available at all times to all participants, producers and consumers alike. To use an example, think of a farmers market. The shoppers can compare the fruits and vegetables, the farmers can weigh the number of customers against the size of their inventories, and so on. Ultimately the guy with the best apples gets the best price. (And, of course, customers don’t mind bruised apples will get them at a different, lower price. They make perfectly good applesauce.)

With sultry blue eyes, sharp, almost perfect features, dimples, and a lazy, bedroomy smile, Burnett not only was knowledgeable about financial issues but had a knack for translating them into plain English, and in contrast to Maria, who was more singularly focused on corporate news, Burnett was interested in broader policy issues—education, health care, how to pay for the repair of America’s crumbling infrastructure. She had a casual, breezy on-air persona. She was also a bit irreverent—and spontaneous.

My wife, sitting next to me, was equally transfixed by Burnett’s flawless complexion and piercing blue eyes. “Jesus Christ she’s hot,” she muttered

A.K. Barnett-Hart, a Harvard undergraduate who had just written a thesis about the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs that remains more interesting than any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject.