Billions beget billions, not (necessarily) innovation.
In the Showtime series ‘Billions’, it’s hard to pinpoint a protagonist.
Both characters, the cocky self-made billionaire investor Bobby Axelrod and the sincere but ruthless US Attorney Chuck Rhoades callously manipulate all the tools at their disposal to ‘stay in the game.’
The show provides a farcical look at how knowing any system well is not a precursor to escaping its more obvious pitfalls.
‘Axe’ and Chuck are, if anything, punished over and over and over again by their own elite success and intimate knowledge of the financial system in which they exist — and it makes for great entertainment.
However, as an allegory, Billions rings a little too true, especially when investigating the somewhat incestuous relationship between securities analysts and publicly traded firms.
The carefully designed interactions between these analysts and the firms they regularly evaluate demonstrate that the short-term pleasure their evaluations often provide can obscure more ominous longer-term consequences for the firms and our global financial system.
