“IN MOVING MONEY, I TRY TO LEARN ABOUT THE HEART OF MAN”

by Santiago Ramos

He works in Boston in a job that has him moving millions of dollars every year.  What helps him to keep his feet on the ground? Here’s the answer
An American of Asian origin, settled in Boston, a Catholic, John Berchet (a fictitious name–“You know, my work requires discretion”) is a financier, or better, the “director for investment strategies” of a firm that moves millions of dollars a year. Enough to send a chill up your spine, these days. And yet the crisis hasn’t got him on the ropes, and certainly hasn’t damaged the way he conceives of his work.

Your work for an investment management firm involves dealing with many things of enormous importance that you can’t see–huge sums of money, the measuring of risk, etc.. In the wake of the crisis, some people are calling for a return to the “real” economy of manufacturing and agriculture. How do you keep yourself grounded in reality? In other words, how do you maintain an awareness that what you work with is something real, with real consequences for yourself and other people?
It’s not about having a manufacturing-based economy, or an agricultural economy. What financial investment firms do is something that all economies need to do: like banks, they help to take people’s savings and use them to invest in other sectors of the economy, so that we can see creativity and growth. You can see the things that are created with the money that is invested. We can get into trouble in two ways. First, when we lose the sense of what the money is doing. It did get to the point where financial products were being created just for the purpose of enhancing financial returns. We did lose sight of helping the investments of the real economy. That’s what we are here for–to help businesses invest, not only to leverage financial gains. The second thing is that people get too optimistic, and they leverage too much. People will always want more–human desire is always for more. You can call that greed, but I don’t think it’s just greed. You always try to top yourself.

When do you feel the most satisfaction in your life at work?
There are two types of investment firms: those that deal on a micro level with specific companies, and those that deal on a macro level, tracking entire economies. I do the latter. I watch the religious sense–the creative spirit of man–at a macro level. When money moves from one country to another, it’s not just about things; it’s about a lot of different factors–about how whole economies are relating to different aspects of reality. It’s history. It’s the same energy that drives manufacturing, industry, etc.
I have to understand the history, culture, and politics of different countries; I have to understand how the religious sense manifests itself in those countries. Look, for example, at Asia. Korea and Japan were both in crisis. Korea has a strong Christian presence. Because of this, Korea had the capacity to recognize the crisis more quickly than Japan, which wanted to save face, keep it quiet. It’s fascinating, to me, to see how Christianity really did make a difference in Korea. They just said, “We screwed up.” It’s possible to say that, because they knew that wouldn’t be the last word on who they are as a people. 
The danger of the financial world is that investors begin to think that finance works like science–that the laws of finance are as exact and predictable as those of science and that there are certain laws that always hold. But what people forget is that finance is not a concept that involves inanimate things. It involves people’s behaviors, decisions–the entire human being is involved: rationality, irrationality, desire, everything. Finance cannot be reduced to a set of laws that are fixed. 

Have you seen money move from rich countries to poor countries?
Sure. The money moves both ways. Eastern to Western Europe, U.S. to Mexico, Mexico to Brazil, Asia. Here’s the point: investing in these poorer countries is rarely prima facie the thing that helps these countries, because how these countries understand money is different in each case. Often, these emerging markets never emerge, because of corruption, because of a variety of things. What helps a country in the longer term is not money from a rich country to a poor country, but it is education–which impacts upon economics, productivity, and labor force growth. Ultimately, the education of your labor force is one of the most important factors. One of the reasons why China has done so well is because they have educated their people, first of all. Second of all, they have the good fortune of not having raw material, like oil. If you don’t have commodities like oil, you realize that you have to work.

What is the outlook for the U.S. after the crisis?
There is no perfect system, because we are dealing with the human person. The U.S. is now struggling with the question, “Who are we?” We thought that capitalism was the answer, and now we don’t know where to go. This is the vertiginous position, no? We are risking now going to the idea that we need to protect mankind from mankind–a protectionist, maybe socialist passage. In front of what appears to be a failure of the system, what are the possible answers? One is the Christian proposal; this is a part of being human. The only way to look at this difficulty is to search for the only place where hope lies. But if you don’t move in that direction, the only other path is: we need to control this, to manage this. Don’t get me wrong–I am not against regulation, not against the government. But the risk is to say that the government always knows better. That is what I am worried about