What’s wrong with Archegos?　Part2

We were talking about why Bill failed despite of religious behaviors.

So, now we may have to come to the negative points: what are the reasons to fail.

Let me explain one by one.

１ Lack of professionalism

As long as he is the professional investor or investment advisor, making huge loss for either his clients (investor) or other parties such as banks doesn’t seem to be professional. Risk mitigation is a part of responsibilities of the financial players. Thus, I must say that at least Bill’s definition of “professional” had been somehow different from that of mine.

２ No harmony, no peace, no temperance

In the past, Bill recorded annual return of 60% of total his investment. This was a quite large return however, while delivering such high figures, some financial institutions, some other investors, or certain authorities have never got satisfied with his behaviors. At the end, many financial players blamed Bill due to his judgement and behaviors. Harmony has always been especially important concept in Japan. When we, human being, do not pay any attention to the harmony, we should start declining in our lives. Every situation where we can find no harmony, we must do something irrational.

3 No real partner

If Bill had had a real partner, with whom Bill had shared a lot of positive and negative feelings, and eagerly discuss their missions and visions, his partner would have advised Bill that stopping trading a while or selling some positions before leveraging gets too high. Like other many top fund managers, Bill had remained a dictator who had held his solitudes.

４ ４No mentor

Between God and Bill, he should have found someone who can intermediate the communication. Inamori had a mentor, a Buddhism monk of a Zen temple in Kyoto. Every time he encountered difficulties, he used to visit that master and asked some advice. For the people who handles huge amount of money or impacts a lot of people, must have a mentor whom they can respect in many aspects.

５Misunderstanding of God’ wish

I assume that Bill interpreted the wealth distribution as follows: Jesus said that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Bill might have thought, “There are a lot of injustices in this world, the wealth distribution looks extremely unfair, so why don’t we realize the good allocation to please God. Thank goodness, with my obtained skills, careers, and credit, I will collect the fund from the rich, generate huge returns, and use the return for philosophic activities. Even though the rich suffers some loss, as long as my objective is justified, this is of course a good action to please God. “ Bill collected money from the rich, and make it larger, separate some amount for philanthropic work.

However, in the bible, Jesus said, “Pay back, therefore, Caesar’s things to Caesar, but God’s things to God.” This can be interpreted as follows; wealth allocation, tax burden, political expense, all of them had already been allocated by God, so we, human beings, should not judge as-is allocation and try to rearrange the allocated portions. In other words, human beings should not get involved in the political issues by using God name. Furthermore, it would not please God that a human being tries to rearrange the world on behalf of God.

We could learn a lot from Bill’s episodes. Those are lessons learned to be shared with many people.

Further queries or doubts, please email to ytomizuka@abrilsjp.com

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