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Source record · S-044

Where do our margins go?

The account as dictated, preserved verbatim. Everything elsewhere on this site that derives from it is a distillation — and where the two differ, this governs.

Recorded 2026-08-15Dictated in sessionAll sources
Provenance

Dictated by Jonathan Paul Hare in working sessions with Claude (Anthropic) and transcribed in-session. Lightly cleaned for typographic errors and false starts; wording, sequence and emphasis preserved. Not an audio transcript. Where the distilled page differs from the source, the source governs.

Primary source

As dictated

I presented to the team what we were doing with the trust network and how that would eliminate information asymmetry. I said the only way you can avoid another meltdown like this is to make sure there's transparency into the underlying assets under these instruments, and explained how our architecture could solve that.

And the Goldman Sachs people said, well, wait a minute. If that happens, where do our margins go? Because our superior visibility into the valuation of underlying assets is where our margins come from — it's literally how we make money.

And I said, well, that's not my problem. And if you want to avoid another financial catastrophe, you're going to have to get rid of your margins and find another way to earn a living.

And guess what? They didn't adopt my approach.

Processing

What was changed, and why

Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.

Editorial record

Hare's recollection of a private meeting. The Goldman participants are not named and no individual is identified.

What is being recorded is an economic argument rather than an allegation: that superior visibility into the valuation of underlying assets is a source of intermediary margin. That is not a controversial proposition in market microstructure — it is the standard account of how dealer profitability works. The notable part is that it was said aloud, in a room convened to design the response to the crisis, as an objection to removing it.

Downstream

What was built from this

Each page below is a distillation of the account above. The chain is recorded in both directions so that a reader, a journalist or a future system can walk from a claim back to what was actually said.

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