Where's my life?

These past 4-5 weeks have blown by. I am working 70 hours a week. I went in on Sunday for 4 hours. Yesterday I went in at 5:30 am, worked until 7pm, played basketball for an hour and a half, went home, showered up, then logged on and worked from home until 11pm. I came in again today at 5:30am. By 5pm I was toast. Absolutely donezo. If you count Sunday, I have worked 31 hours this week and it's only Tuesday! I'm not complaining though, it's good to have a job and my work is incredibly interesting and exciting right now. Each day is bringing new and exciting challenges. There is an element of excitement in the markets for me right now. The markets are in unprecedented space and everything is new, the economy is being redefined.

Last week my friend Ace spoke at the first Liwanag meeting of the UCI academic year about the importance of LOG in his life. He did a really good job and stimulated some self reflection for myself. I realized how amazing it is that my life somehow feels balanced right now despite the long hours and lack of sleep. An hour at Mass on Sunday and a couple hours at a LOG meeting on Tuesday night are so powerful for me because they balance out a 70 hour work week. I am generally in a good mood every single day and am really trying to push myself. After all it's in the thick of the battle that you prove yourself. I feel like I've been given strength. Yo LOG thanks for the love and support!

To top off my ridiculous career commitments, CFA studying will soon be getting underway. Hopefully I can form a support group of others studying for exams and we can push each other. I will pass Level II. By the first Saturday in June, the hard work will have finished. I am getting eager.

On the topic of the markets today I thought about how delevering is unambiguously swallowing up every nook of the financial landscape (stocks, widening credit spreads, Oil!). I started to think about how all of the solutions to the financial crisis vis-a-vis TARP and other policy responses effectively are efforts to re-lever the financial system. Lending and credit is a levered business model and that is what is broken. I need to brush up on my econ to evaluate this response. Over reaching leverage caused this problem, but I need to research the negative effects of deleveraging to 0. I suppose this would create severe deflation. This last paragraph has done a good job of creating a framework in my mind to see that real economic growth is to some degree dependent on ample leverage. So in the brave newly landscaped financial world, the goal of massive policy interventions into market space should be a comfortably levered financial system with regulatory measures to prevent over reaching leverage on the high side to prevent future needs for delevering circuit breakers on the down side when excessive leverage creates houses of cards that all blow away from the same gusts of wind.

Completely unrelated, there are some cats on my street with a banging social life. They are always messing around in the middle of the street. I think there's three of them and they are always playing out in the open. I like it, they are fun.