Matt Levine, Columnist

Compliance Therapy and Software Rules

Also high-frequency trading, the DAO, mergers, Ukraine, and a worrying absence of unicorn and liquidity worries.

May 31, 2016 at 1:11 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Banks.

One simple plausible story about the U.S. banking industry is that in 2006 it was fun and aggressive and wild and dangerous, and in 2026 it will be boring and sleepy and safe and utility-like, but in 2016 it's a roiling sea of psychosexual conflict as it transitions from one state to the other. What would Freud make of this amazing Wall Street Journal article about bankers, regulators and compliance? Here's the kicker, an anecdote about a training program for bank compliance officers: