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The Rise of the (Financial) Machines
BartlebyScrivener writes "A New York Times Op-Ed quoting Freeman and George Dyson wonders if Wall Street geeks and 'quants' outsmarted themselves with computer algorithms to create the current financial debacle: 'Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers.'"
The quoted essay from George Dyson is available at Edge.
And here is some NYT contributer who wants to blame computers and the nerds. Sure, blame the scary robotic overlords. The financial collapse can't be the fault of ordinary humans, no sir!
This is just some attention-whoring author trying to use the financial crisis in order to sell more books (even though his book has nothing to do with the crisis). Nothing to see here, please move along.
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I am a quantitative analyst.
And you've managed to come up with an explanation that says quantitative analysts are not to blame. That is an extremely surprising thing for you to do.
No, it's the dumbing of america, as is tfa.
You are quite right to say that it is wrong to stay that socialism is risky. IT's not. It's a known, proven, stupid thing to do and if Democrats genuinely get their way, you can expect to see that we shall all be sold the benefits of a sharply reduced standard of living in order to cover for the failures of that system. WE'll all be nice and poor but the earth will be safe, and you won't have to bitch about the rich, because there won't be any... just a few high place appartchiks in government.
You know, its pretty hard to call this the work economic downturn in 100 years when we are all sitting at home on our fancy computers and writing posts on slashdot. If this was the great depression or anything like it, we would be out looking for food and it is probably that we might not even have electricity, let alone Core 2 Duo processes. That we could even call what will likely be a modest economic downturn a "depression" is really indicative of just how successful free enterprise is.
Let us contrast our "worst" of capitalism to some of socialism's supposed successes. Is the living standard of Cuba so high right now? Where's that big explosion of Cuban computer programmers? Similarly, the people in North Korea do not even have electricity at all.
We can say that this big capital meltdown is a disaster, but, let's remember that we did, for this 700B bailout, wind up getting nearly 6 trillion dollars worth of new housing construction and for a country whose population is going to double over the next 50 years, this is not a bad investment to make at all, long term. And, it is very likely, given experience with similar bailouts such as occurred with RTC, the spinoff of Conrail, or even the bailout to Chrysler, that the government will actually take a profit from it.
This is my sig.
You don't want to grow up to be one of the clueless barbarians that cause the trouble we are in and then wonder why people turn on them.
Always with socialists is the threat of violence. Give us your goods, enslave your labors to our cause, or we will kill you.
Has not 500 million dead from socialism been enough for you psychopaths? You people aren't interested in shared ownership, only theft, plunder, and killing.
Even the peacenik theme is a joke. Russia's communists came to power protesting the war in 1917, and wound up killing ten times as many Russians in Gulags.
Socialism is worse than treason, its an innate terrorist assault on society.
This is my sig.