Small Nations, Big Ledgers

People occasionally ask me, usually at a dinner where the wine has loosened the conversation past the polite version of the question, why I gave up a trading floor in London for a government office in Oslo that pays a fraction of what I was making. The polite answer I usually give is something about wanting to work on problems that mattered more directly to people I actually knew. That answer is true, but it's incomplete, and I think the more honest version is worth writing down properly, because it's less about virtue and more about a genuine, hard-won reassessment of what kind of speed actually matters.

What a trading floor teaches you about speed

I spent nearly a decade as a strategist, most of it at Nordbank Capital, and I want to be clear that I don't regret any of it I learned things there I couldn't have learned anywhere else, and I use them constantly in my current work in ways I didn't expect to. What a trading floor teaches you, more than any specific technical skill, is a particular relationship with speed. Markets reward being right slightly before everyone else is right, and they punish being right too late with roughly the same severity as being wrong altogether. You develop, almost by necessity, a kind of cognitive reflex where every piece of information gets immediately triaged by one question: does this change my position right now, and if so, by how much.

This is a genuinely useful skill, and I don't want to undersell it. It teaches you to separate signal from noise under real time pressure, to hold a view with conviction while remaining genuinely willing to abandon it the moment the evidence shifts, which is a harder discipline than it sounds and one I watched plenty of talented people fail to develop even after years of trying. But it also teaches you, more subtly and more problematically, that speed is close to a terminal value in itself. The trader who's right a week later than the trader who's right today has, in the market's accounting, simply lost, regardless of how much more thoroughly they might have thought the problem through in that extra week.

What policy work teaches you instead

Government work operates on a completely different clock, and the adjustment was more disorienting than I expected, even having gone in with eyes open about the pace difference. A piece of tax reform I worked on early in my time at the Ministry took the better part of two years from initial proposal to enacted legislation, and at multiple points during those two years I found myself instinctively frustrated in a way that, looking back, was really just my trading-floor reflexes misfiring in an environment they weren't built for. I wanted to move. The problem clearly needed to move. And it needed, instead, to sit through consultation rounds, coalition negotiations, and the sort of institutional patience that would have gotten you fired for underperformance on any trading floor I ever worked on.

What I came to understand, slowly and not without real professional frustration along the way, is that this slowness isn't simply institutional friction to be tolerated or optimized away wherever possible. In a lot of cases, it's actually doing real work. A tax reform that moves too fast risks getting the details wrong in ways that only become apparent once it's already law and already shaping real behavior, at which point the cost of correcting the mistake is far higher than the cost of having taken longer to get it right the first time. A policy that hasn't gone through genuine consultation with the people it affects tends to generate compliance problems and legitimate grievances down the line that a faster, more unilateral process would never have surfaced until it was already too late to address them cheaply.

The trade I didn't fully understand until I'd made it

I don't think I fully grasped, when I made the move in 2017, what I was actually trading. I thought I was trading a faster feedback loop for a slower one, and accepting the slower one because the work felt more meaningful. That's not wrong, but it's not the whole picture either. What I was really trading was a feedback loop that told me quickly whether I was right, for one that told me, much more slowly, whether I'd actually helped anyone.

A trading floor gives you almost immediate, almost brutally honest feedback on the quality of your thinking the market moves, your position gains or loses money, and there's very little room for self-deception about whether your view was good. Policy work offers nothing like that clarity, and I underestimated how much I'd miss it. You draft a piece of reform, it passes, and then the actual effect of that reform unfolds over years, tangled up with dozens of other simultaneous changes in the economy, such that isolating your specific contribution to any outcome becomes genuinely, permanently difficult. I've worked on policies I still don't have full confidence actually achieved what we intended, half a decade later, and I've had to make peace with the fact that this uncertainty isn't a temporary state I'll eventually resolve. It's simply what slow, consequential work looks like from the inside.

What each side taught the other

If I'm honest about what each world got wrong about the other, from where I now sit having lived in both, it's this: the trading floor was wrong to treat speed as a near-terminal virtue, because in most of the domains that actually shape people's lives at scale, being right a year later after genuine deliberation beats being right today off a hasty read that skipped the deliberation. But the policy world, in its own way, is wrong to treat slowness as inherently virtuous just because it's traditional, when a meaningful share of it is genuinely just institutional friction with no corresponding benefit, dressed up after the fact as careful process because that's a more comfortable story to tell than admitting the delay served no one.

The honest version of my answer, the one I don't usually give at dinner because it takes longer than the conversation allows, is that I didn't leave finance because I decided speed didn't matter. I left because I came to believe that the kind of speed markets reward and the kind of speed that actually helps people are two different things wearing the same name, and I wanted to spend the second half of my career getting better at telling them apart. I'm still working on it. I don't think that's a project with a finish line.