Having technology perform many of the functions that front-office staff have traditionally done, allows banks to improve their efficiency - industrialise as you say.
However, it also allows the financial industry to become commoditiesed and lowers the barriers to entry. You only need to walk down the City of London to see the sheer number of banks form all over the world. They all compete (except when they collude) and drive down prices. Secondly, you also start seeing large corporates doing their own banking - what does a bank to that BP can't do on their own?
My banking charges only ever seem to go up, while the interest I earn in the bank is quite pathetic, due to the instability they have caused. We have had 7 years of "emergency low" interest rates here in Europe.
That being said, a significant portion of the pain is from giving birth on a hospital bed - or just lying flat in general. It is said (as a man, I have never given birth) that it is less painful, and therefore less in need of an epidural, if the birthing is done in a upright or crouching position. Like how an orangutan does it : http://youtu.be/JfVnFJDjUyQ?t=30s
The very idea of lying down for a birth dates back to the 18th century, when some French king wanted to see the birth of his heir. Of course men were not allowed in the birthing room, so he had to peek through a hole in the wall - or something like that. And the queen had to be in a position that allowed the king to see, so she was lying down facing so the king could see what was going on.
You don't have to lie on a bed in the hospital. You can still use a birthing stool or something (assuming the hospital has them, but they're cheap, so there's no reason not to).
I believe parent meant that position doesn't change size. It may be faster, but one way or another the pain does come from pushing the baby out and potentially making lots of damage to someone's crotch in the process.
It should be noted that in the UK, as opposed to the US and Australia, most births don't have doctors present. Births are normally monitored by a midwife in a maternity ward, as opposed to a doctor in a ob/gen clinic. So the move from a hospital setting into a home setting is not such a big leap in the UK.
Actually, that's the same as Australia: standard procedure in public hospitals is two midwives in a maternity room with 1 doctor on call overseeing the whole ward.
But moving to a home setting still seems like a poor choice. Even ignoring the higher fatality rate for home births, having the doctor available to sew up the 20% of "normal" deliveries involving vaginal tearing seems like a good move.
That's a good point. Our son was delivered by a midwife but due to his size (10 pounds) the OB/GYN came in after to repair the damage caused by delivery. I'm more that a little grateful for that. :O
Things are changing. If I understand Dodd-Frank/EMIR correctly, every OTC derivatives trade now has to be reported to the regulator within something like 15 minutes (or was it 15 days?).
Anyways, the regulators now will have a pretty complete picture of what each bank holds, at least for a single asset-class.
Though, I suspect information on exchange traded stocks, and centrally cleared swaps are also available to the regulators, via the respective exchanges and execution facilities.
In reality, the swap data repositories are finding the data submitted by each institution very difficult to reconcile - it's a step in the right direction but the goal of constructing a full representation of each financial institution's derivatives exposure is still a way off.
Not knowing about what would be required to model these full representations, is it just a typical "too much data, not enough data scientists" problem, or are there fundamental research questions to be answered here? For that matter, does the SEC even employ or contract/grant big-data researchers for these types of problems? It seems like it's exactly the type of problem that a government research grant should be intended to solve!
Defining a swap: the OTC market is complex and there is no standard representation for many of the products - this makes reconciling data submitted by each of the firms complex. A simple interest rate swap report could contain up to 1,000 elements to fully describe a trade.
Volume: the 2 major OTC reporting regimes, Dodd-Frank and ESMA, both generate tens of millions of trade reports daily. This data needs to be correct; needs to be both ingested and retrieved quickly and needs to support complex post-reporting processing and queries.
Complex workflow: each swap undergoes many changes during it's lifetime, which complicates the workflow and data for reporting. For example, you may trade a block CDS, which is split into 20 allocations, some of which are new trades and some that alter existing trades (step ins; step outs; terminations; reductions...). Each of the allocations may require different reporting treatments.
And yes, the 'too much data, not enough scientists' problem with interpreting the submissions. Bear in mind that the SEC reporting hasn't started yet - that's 2015...
