Light at the end of a learning tunnel - Sometimes learning things really pushes you to and past your abilities. It's very difficult at times. It's like what the James Cole, the character played by Bruce Willis goes through in the Terry Gilliam directed movie 12 Monkeys before being sent back to the past. All these related pieces of information passing over you, passing through you. You see partial patterns and links and bits that make sense, but it's also total chaos in places, things that just don't fit, everything swishing around in a gigantic cauldron.
The pieces you understand are continuously getting knocked over by the bits that are out of place. You percevere reguardless and at some point things start to settle and eventually it makes sense. That's a nice moment, and then with practice, a lot of it, you can really master the dynamics of the thing you were trying to learn. Then you look back and can't remember what was so complicated about it in the first place. When you've been through this process enough times in different areas you can recognise it happening. A lot of people really don't understand learning, or at least learning something complex. It takes time, weeks, months, sometimes years, and you also have to deal with people constantly knocking you off track.
That is what I think is happening to me with my learnings about the financial system. Specifically the latest episode of Eurodollar University Podcast all about interest rate swap spreads. Sounds kind of boring until you see the bigger picture. Interest swap spreads give you a way to infer what's happening in the centre of the black hole that is the international eurodollar financial system. A system which is operated by a cartell of large private banks, and notiriously difficult to see directly, just like black holes throughout the cosmos. It's important because it's the bedrock for international trade, so if you want to understand macro, you gotta have this methodology in your toolbelt.
That requires a deep and intuitive understanding of the relevant financial primitives, the building blocks, something that I'm still grapling with, but I know enough to know that it's important. My level of ken on this reminds me of the time just before I mastered differencial equations back in school or large scale computer system network topologies when I was working in IT enterprise software architecture. It's hard but I can tell that I'll eventually figure it out. It's like you are looking at a jump across a ravine. You've jumped across many ravines before, this one is a little bit different, but technically it should be possible. You currently have annoying flip flops and when those get replaced with real running shoes, when the primitives are correctly solidified in your mind, you will be able to make it to the other side. #