A socialist uses the Bloomberg terminal, part 1
When I got interested in school bonds, a friend and comrade who had done some research work for climate groups told me to look at a Bloomberg terminal. I was listening to finance podcasts and scanning long PDFs of bond documents at the time, trying to get a better sense of what all these data and laws meant in municipal finance. She said it would help. The experience of finding and using this technology was strange and wonderful but in a bitter sort of way.
When I looked up Bloomberg terminals I was shocked. To get a subscription for the most basic version of the terminal, which is really just a platform, is around $26,000. That's nearing a third of my yearly salary, a year's worth of payments on my mortgage, just slightly more than a year of Thisbe's childcare. Not going to happen. What the hell are these things anyway?
The terminals are like a finance Skynet. They have constantly updated information on all kinds of information relating to investment. All the finance bros are glued to them because it's where you see the prices of things go up and down in real time, but with ready to hand context news, background data, and historical trends. The finance journalists I was following were always posting screenshots of their Bloomberg terminals I realized.
The screen is weird looking: it's a black background with orange, white, blue, and green text and has a 1980s DOS-style look. The keyboard is also funny looking. It's got bright green and red buttons with totally different commands than a typical keyboard.
Even though it looks old, the terminal is actually the bleeding edge of the present when it comes to capitalist information. The news about pretty much anything comes out on this platform first. And Bloomberg is the foremost provider of this service, which is how Michael Bloomberg made his fortune.
I didn't really know what I'd find if I were to look at a Bloomberg terminal, but I thought it was worth a shot.
Ignorant teaching at the lab
I read somewhere that university business schools have Bloomberg labs. They're like computer labs but with a paid subscription that students and faculty can use for free. So I started emailing around and indeed, my university has one. When I discovered this it was the early stages of the pandemic shutdowns in 2020 so no one was going to campus in person. But I connected with the administrators who control access to the lab. I had to explain that I was faculty in the college of education and doing research on school finance, which they didn't really understand, but after I said it a couple times they were like "oh okay, yeah sure, come on down!"
Whenever I want to learn something, I teach it. There's no better way to dig into something deeply than by preparing to tell other people about it. Plus I like to treat my students as co-researchers, inviting them to find things that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. It's counter-intuitive but I've seen that students get a lot out of class when I don't know everything about the material. It helps me be less overbearing, explainy, and domineering. It implicitly presumes that my students are intelligent--as equally intelligent as I am--which creates a fresher and less stifling atmosphere in the classroom. Bringing my students to the lab would force me to familiarize myself with the lab and get trained on the terminal, but would also help me learn. (The French philosopher Jacques Ranciere calls this ignorant teaching.)
While putting together my spring seminar on legal and financial issues in education, I thought to take my students to the Bloomberg lab and have them do financial research on their school districts. That's a thing because you can invest in school districts like any company or stock. The investor side of school district finance is called "fixed income investment" since municipal bonds--the thing that you'd invest in--have fixed interest yield rates and thus you can make reliable payments if you invest in them. They're steady, tax-free investments.
I made a date to check out the lab when I was campus recently and had a fascinating experience.
Stranger in a strange land
I felt out of place from the beginning. Just walking into the business school was like going to a different country. Everything was shiny, new, and futuristic. It's one of the newest buildings on campus and has start-upy swivel chairs, flatscreen TVs, message boards, and stock tickers everywhere. I walked up three flights of stairs to the level that had the lab. (None of the students had masks on. Not a single one. The university had become mask optional earlier that week.)
The Bloomberg lab is across the hall from the president's suite. The university president's office. I chuckled to myself. Of course the president is located nearby the capitalist fountain of data. I don't think he ever goes in there, but there's something about the juxtaposition of the most powerful person at the institution being near the finance data spigot that made sense.
I liked the feeling of being out of place. A socialist probably 'shouldn't' be there, but there I was. The administrator I'd emailed with was super friendly and gave me the door code to the lab, which is only open to people who have approved access.
There was a class in the lab when I arrived, an undergraduate finance class. Displayed very prominently was a banner advertising the student investment club. Students at the university interested in finance and investment have a club. The Bloomberg lab is the club's home base. And apparently only certain people use this space: the professor looked at me with a raised eyebrow when I walked in after the class ended.
Something I noticed immediately was that there weren't computers on the desks in this computer lab. I'm used to seeing monitors, PCs, keyboards, mice all set up in a computer lab. There wasn't anything like that. There were two lines of thin tables facing one another, like a speed dating setup. There were monitors at either end though, so I sat myself down at one. Maybe students use laptops?
Like I said, the professor gave me a stink eye. After talking with a student after class (the conversation was all about the student wanting to work in finance and how to do that), he came over to me. I introduced myself and said I was faculty in the college of education doing research on school finance. He relaxed and said, Oh cool! I could feel the energy around these terminals. There's something precious, special, and deserving of protection about them. They are key tools in the reproduction of dominant relations of production. They are how students learn to become professional capitalists.
We chatted a bit and the professor gave me his card. I got to work on the machine.
Treasure trove
When I got myself settled--I made an account, signed in, and opened the terminal--I stumbled around. I had to look at some documents Kylie had sent me explaining how to use the interface. It runs on certain codes/commands and is very different than regular computers. But when I got the hang out of it I found several school districts, recent bond issues, and it was pretty cool. It was a treasure trove. I could see up to date volumes of trades, tranches of debt, the details of the deals, with helpful breakdowns of everyone involved in making the bond happen: consultants, law firms, banks, depositories, underwriters, etc.
Every school district has a unique page with local, state, and federal demographic information and pricing conditions. You can graph historical data on housing price indices, population increases/decreases, credit rating shifts across multiple credit rating agencies and levels (insured credit rating, underlying credit rating). You can dig into individual bond deals or zoom out on all bond deals.
I realized that the terminal provides the most interesting data in bond statements but from a screen in a much easier format. You don't have to scroll through hundreds of pages of legalese to find certain information. It's also more fine-grained in terms of time. You can see when a district sells specific tranches of the debt, not just the schedule set forth for it. I noticed that the interest rate wasn't as prominent on the dashboard. The yield is front and center. Why? That's what investors really care about. They don't care about what it costs the district as much as what they'll be able make from the district. The terminal is from the investor side, which does limit it in certain ways I imagine.
What's public?
It's jarring to see a school district listed like a company on the stock market. It reinforces an idea I've been percolating, which is that our "public" school system is private in so many ways beyond and more deeply than charter schools, private schools, etc. Our concept of 'private' is almost entirely legal/juridical. It's not material at all. I could find the most public of public districts on the Bloomberg terminal and the price of that district as a commodity. Is that public?
The fact that people can champion a public system that's treated as a commodity is consistent with a socialist understanding of liberalism. Liberalism is private property-based individual and group freedoms. When public school districts are commodities and get their facilities financing from being traded on a private market like commodities, it's hard for me think of them as public schools. Of course, public schools are so different than privates and charters, it'd be reductionist to say there's no difference. Legally public schools pay higher salaries, tolerate/encourage unionism, accept all students, and are funded through property taxes which everyone is legally compelled to pay.
But my experience at the Bloomberg terminal told me that juridical-public doesn't mean economic-public. One thing socialists want is more democracy in the economy and here's a great example of what that could look like. Public school districts shouldn't need to be on the Bloomberg terminals!
What're you doing here
As I was geeking out, quietly gasping to myself, a student walked into the lab. He said hi, put some things down on the desk, and kind of shuffled them around in a desultory way. He kept looking at me so I chatted him up. I repeated, like I was presenting my papers to a border guard, that I was faculty in the college of education researching school finance. He said okay, cool. It was the same relief others had experienced once I'd made myself legible to them. He introduced himself as the president of the student investment club.
He said that whenever someone he doesn't recognize is in the lab he comes in and checks it out "just to make sure." The interpellation here is clear: only certain people access this capitalist data under certain qualified circumstances. I guess it makes sense in a way--you don't want just anyone wandering around a chemistry or physics lab--but something about it being finance is irksome. Not just anyone can look at the lifeblood of capital as it flows!
But once we got to talking and I established that I didn't know much and just wanted to learn more (again, ignorance as a tactic but also a truth), he became very friendly and helped me navigate some pages. He offered to send me some notes he'd made about what certain terms mean. There was something about that too, something humane but also unnerving to interact with someone whose ideology is so different over a technical issue we both have an interest in.
In any case, I'll be going back to do the actual research with students in a few weeks and will report back after that with another post on what we find.
A coda: after the president of the investment club left, I wondered how I'd have my students work at a terminal with only two actual computers. Would I ask students to download something? I walked along the desks and noticed tabs sticking out. The tabs had arrows. I noticed that each desk had a carved out line for a small trap door in it. "No way," I thought. But yes: I pulled the tab with the up-facing arrow and the monitor rose out of the trap door on a motorized platform. It was like Star Trek or some cheesy sci-fi. The capitalists get all the toys!