The babylon paradigm

Why the Babylon paradigm?

When I think of the Babylon tower I think about the great schism of the human kind. The last common endeavor, the ultimate challenge to reach God that ended in ruins. It is the perfect metaphor of our civilization's dysfunction---a common ground beneath us, but yet so many languages to convey this.

Lost in translation are feelings, ideas, and ideals. And this is how humans describe their thoughts, but what about the way they describe their wealth. One dollar to the western men means a colored, high-fructose corn syrup sweetened beverage. For a Somalian family, it means meat for dinner this month. This same dollar can buy me 1.4 levs in my home, Bulgaria, with which I can sit in the pub and enjoy a cold beer. In other words, to translate one's wealth to another human being is as difficult as to translate one's thoughts. The question then is what destroyed the Babylon tower. Was it the inability to tell the fellow mason how to put one more stone in the tower, or how to measure the value of his work against yours. Did God destroyed our effort to reach him through giving us different words, or by giving us different ways to define our fortunes.

Thus, for me the foreign exchange, the translation of the wealth of one nation into the wealth of another, is a remnant of this Babylon legend. Now that the new tower called globalization is being build, how the human race is exchanging its currencies can determine the fate of this new endeavor. The volume of this exchange is tremendous, every half a month or so, through the Forex market passes the equivalence of the world yearly output (World GDP 2008= $60 tr., Forex dailly turnover> $4 tr ). Observing the trends that emerge through this process is like observing the twists of history---from close it can look as random as the bouncing of a single atom, but from afar everything looks as natural and predetermined as the flow of the Mississippi river.

This blog is my take on the foreign exchange market. I will try to share my thoughts of the immediate randomness that rocks this world, and try to put everything into the context of the big currents of wealth translation.