Tom Luongo on seing people from all sides
2024-10-02 11:57:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I find myself liking or at least interested in many of Tom Luongo’s takes on global finance, and geopolitics.
He appears to be quite anti-british, so some of the things he says definitely make me wince somewhat, but on listening to his points, many times they do have at least some things that are worth considering, angles that I would never have considered. The brit in me is often wondering what an equivalent, a british Tom Luongo, if you will, would say. I think sometimes he’s a little too forgiving of indiscressions made by people his side of the pond. But hey, that’s normal, we all instincively defend our own team.
Aside from the anti-brit stuff, which like I said, is actually quite well thought out even if it’s a little bit bonkers, there‘s great takes on how central bank mono rates like the FED funds rate or the ECB’s interest rate, re-enforce established powers, transfering wealth from peripheral entities, and a possible move away from Davos globalism back to more regional banking models, as well as the unrealised export of the US economic model, and a bunch more.
So although he does definitely vear into slighlty crazy town sometimes, he often lays out some kind of wise ways of looking at things, no matter what political or geographic persuasion you are. His closing words on the importance of seing people from all sides is definitely one of those:
There are so many competing incentives that you have to...just be careful, the way I’m going to put it is this: No one is any one thing at any one time. People in pivotal positions, can be simultaneously, to quote Tom Soper, consecutively and concurrently, hero, victim and villain. The 3 sides of all character.
When you look at a figure like Jerome Powell for example, or Janet Yelling or whoever, you have to see them from all sides. And I hate to do that for Yelling because I think she’s the villain.
Look at a guy like Powell who is a very pivotal figure in history, look at a guy like Trump, look at these people that are confounding. They are the fulcra on which all of this will turn, and they are going to have competing roles that they are going to want to be cast in. And we have to be willing to view them from different positions, from those 3 perspectives, even though we know in the grand scheme of things, in our philosophical hearts, they are one thing, they are the villain or hero or the victim. But a guy like Powel is all 3 all the time. You can’t be FED chair and not be all 3 of those things.
So that’s what I would argue for people to do a little bit more of, and if we do that, I think all of our commentary gets a lot better. [...]
It usually yields the best insights. Let’s freeze frame that person for a second and think about it from their perspective. Now what. Oh that’s interesting...
This is such a true statement, I’ve rarely heard it expressed so well. He is of course talking about things in the world of global finance, but I think it’s actually a point you can make about many areas of life. I think I’d heard something like this mentioned in the past and thought to myself, oh yeah, that makes sense, I get it. But then as you get experience in the world there comes a point when you really see what people were talking about, and it’s unbelievably disorientating. It’s like your brain needs a certain amount of data to even get to the point of being able to see this point of view.
And it’s even weirder because sometimes you have complete flips. People you really thought were horrible, you actually start to see them in a different light, understanding their behaviour better because you have additional context that you were missing. And the other way too, folks you thought were awesome, becoming in your mind pretty aweful. And other times when it’s a mixture of both things happening. And actually it’s even weirder than that because some people are even exploiting this phenominon etc etc. But you can’t get bogged down in all of this stuff too much. This might actually be the most profound thing that has happened for me in my late 30s and 40s.
It happens so gradually, you don’t notice it at first, and of course you yourself are changing as a person as well, so it’s not an obvious thing. You are sort of left with these updated models in your head for people that are imperfect, with holes in them, and you have to be okay with that, but other parts where you are like, oh yeah this part of them was the part I really liked, or hated or whatever. When it happens it shows you quite a lot about yourself, what your instinctive views are, and you have to accept that at some point in the past you were unknowingly ignoring somethings or unknowingly shutting out other aspects.
It’s the strangest thing to realise, and come to terms with. #