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The Formula That Killed Wall Street

We recently discussed the perspective that the harrowing of Wall Street was caused by over-reliance on computer models that produced a single number to characterize risk. Wired has a piece profiling David X. Li, the quant behind the formula that enabled the creation of such simple risk models. "For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels. His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. ... [T]he real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust."

118 of 561 comments (clear)

  1. the formula that killed wall street: by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Insightful

    G+R+E+E+D

    --
    I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
    We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    1. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by inviolet · · Score: 2, Insightful

      the formula that killed wall street:

      G+R+E+E+D

      Then we have the same problem in the real world -- everyone is using the same formula. For example, the formula you cite is also:

      • the formula that built slashdot
      • the formula that sent the explorers to the New World
      • the formula that invented bronze and later iron
      • the formula that started farming in the Fertile Crescent
      • the formula powering most religions

      But since you've gotten the ball rolling on the subject of spitting meaningless venom onto the audience, let me join in with one of my own:

      the formula that killed wall street: O+U+T+S+O+U+R+C+I+N+G

      --
      FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
    2. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Insightful

      actually, greed is good. it's the great motivator. really, it's the only motivator.

      It's a good motivator when it's tempered with wisdom. It's a bad motivator when you blinds you to the long term consequences of your actions. I've been saying for years that it seems like our entire economic system has been tailored to next quarters results at the expense of building/investing for the long term. Who cares if this quarter has record profits if you paid for those record profits with the future viability of your enterprise?

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    3. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by aurispector · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Greed is a motivator. Greedy people will work hard to acquire money. Capitalism & free enterprise allow a society to harness greedy people for positive ends like the creation of jobs to produce valuable goods and services. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, greedy people are not necessarily *smart*. And even the smart greedy people are not necessarily *correct* when they do things a particular way.

      The story sums it up nicely - this formula oversimplifies a complex market creating a classic bursting bubble. There's an economist named Taleb http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ lecturing about how the market will basically always be more complex than you think.

      The best part about his message is in not trusting your data too much. I think of this every time people start talking confidently about geoengineering. We don't know as much as we think we do.

      --
      I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
    4. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by portscan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      yes, i completely agree with you. the focus on quarterly earnings is representative of "short-termism" everywhere, which is usually detrimental to long term value preservation.

      i guess what i should have said is that greed is not going anywhere. harness it when you can and don't be surprised when it causes people to do things that harm others.

    5. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by Shakrai · · Score: 2, Insightful

      i guess what i should have said is that greed is not going anywhere

      That's the truth. I would just hope that we can temper our greed with a little bit of wisdom and an outlook on the future. I like your phrase, btw, "short-termism". Seems like short-termism has infected our soceity from the citizen buying a big screen TV they can't afford, all the way up to the Federal Government that tried to wage two wars and expand the social safety net on credit.....

      Americans like to have our cake and eat it too apparently.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    6. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by bazonic · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Totally. This is reason we need sensible regulations. History shows us that when humans are left to their own devices and money is involved, we cannot be trusted. Greed must recognized and factored into our systems of checks and balances, and not just in the finacial industry, but any place money and power are involved.

    7. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by kabocox · · Score: 2, Insightful

      yes, i completely agree with you. the focus on quarterly earnings is representative of "short-termism" everywhere, which is usually detrimental to long term value preservation.

      i guess what i should have said is that greed is not going anywhere. harness it when you can and don't be surprised when it causes people to do things that harm others.

      If you want your company to focus on long term profits, then you'll likely find that it is a family or employ owned business that doesn't offer any public stock. They don't want you telling them in any form or fashion how to run their business. Here is a question for slashdot. Those that work at companies that are entirely family or employ owned, do you feel that your company is in better shape than those public stock corporations?

    8. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by maraist · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I would just hope that we can temper our greed

      Huh? In other words, if I have the intellect and the good fortune to make an extra dollar, I shouldn't? We're not talking necessarily about evil pyramid schemes here. We're talking about the aggregate effect of every day investors that see the potential of making literally an extra penny per share by taking a course of action.. Since they're essentially gambling, they've taken incredible losses over the months (any given set of months), and thus are more and more desperate for every little bit that can count. Couple this with the fact that many investors are rated based on their ROI performance - they are not acting out of greed, they're acting out of self preservation for their job.

      So are you saying, the aggregate masses should be a little less greedy? Then that 1% net profitability for which gambling greed drives them should simply not play.

      Hey, I'm all for it man. I think Mutual funds and Hedge funds were the beginning of the end of Capitalism as we know it. Lets go back to Direct investment where people have a stake in their stock. Make retirement funds for the middle class purely interest bearing again. I'm not even being sarcastic - all my retirement is in inflation based securities. I'm in disbelief of the 401k mania over the past 15 years - and scold republicans for wanting to replace S.S. with 401ks.

      --
      -Michael
    9. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by jambox · · Score: 2

      It's the dumb tyranny of the shareholder. If you can get them dividends from one quarter to the next, they will pay you any sum as salary or a bonus. I've sat through meetings where a senior VP outlined, essentially, a plan for running the company into the ground over the next two years. He's retired now. At 40.

      --
      You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
    10. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by WhiplashII · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Those that work at companies that are entirely family or employ owned, do you feel that your company is in better shape than those public stock corporations?

      Without a doubt, yes.

      I own 3 companies - all three are growing through this recession. None had any debt.

      --
      while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
    11. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by mike2R · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Those that work at companies that are entirely family or employ owned, do you feel that your company is in better shape than those public stock corporations?

      Well we have no debt and about 4 months worth of costs in savings, does that answer your question? :)

      --
      This sig all sigs devours
    12. Re:the formula that killed wall street: by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 2

      Actually, the problem is that sometime in the 90's (I think I remember the start point correctly), dividends became incidental. It was all about increasing stock price. It was a result of the tax rate on capital gains being lower than the tax rate on dividends. Investors preferred to receive the profits on their investments in the form of increased stock price instead of dividends.
      After Enron, I saw an article written by an economist/investment adviser (I forget his exact credentials), that explained that the Enron scam would not have been possible for a company paying dividends. He linked to several articles he had published about investing in companies that paid dividends over the long haul. I am pretty sure that his logic would apply to this situation as well, companies that pay dividends could not have gotten over leveraged in the manner that caused this economic crisis. The logic is that to pay dividends you have to have real profits to distribute, not just paper profits.

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
  2. Tribute to Huntz Hall... by Samschnooks · · Score: 5, Funny

    Enter Li, a star mathematician who grew up in rural China in the 1960s. He excelled in school and eventually got a master's degree in economics from Nankai University before leaving the country to get an MBA from Laval University in Quebec. That was followed by two more degrees: a master's in actuarial science and a PhD in statistics, both from Ontario's University of Waterloo.

    He has more degrees than a thermometer!

  3. Citation, please by dlcarrol · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.

    Citation? Booms and busts are caused by, respectively, expansion and contraction of the money supply (usually in the form of bank credit), often accompanied by manipulated interest rates. The formulas used by lots of investing firms could cause clusters of errors, but the extent of types of companies (and governments) affected points to a more Austrian-style, systemic boom/bust rather than a single-(important-)sector miscalculation.

    1. Re:Citation, please by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Classical economics cannot explain what is happening right now. It's without precedent. There is a little graph I would like to show you...

            It's interesting to note the near exponential shape of the graph pre dot com bust era, and how the exponential part resumes around 2005. Now, imagine the impact on everyone with money to invest, from corporations to banks to retirement and pension funds faced with a choice. You can earn 4% or less, per annum, in bonds or (LAUGH) CD's, etc. OR you can put money on the stock market. That's one hell of an "opportunity cost" if you don't - because everyone else is making out like a bandit. The stock market is unstoppable.

            In fact, the only OTHER "safe" place to put your money is real estate...

              Both of them went bust at roughly the same time. Co incidence? No, they were intertwined from the beginning, because they were the "safest" "surest" bets, and that's where all the wealth was going. So according to supply and demand, if too much money was chasing these "goods", the price moved up accordingly. However these two retracements have wiped out the present AND FUTURE wealth of most of the nation, because everyone was BANKING on the fact that their stocks, 401(k) or home was going to see them through retirement. Welcome to reality - the money is gone (because the demand is gone), and we're not finished yet. The graph still points STRAIGHT down. Something HUGE has to happen to change that. Most people thought it would be a new president, but now we know that's not the case.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    2. Re:Citation, please by El+Torico · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Will there be a reprise of the Glass Steagall Act? It was initially passed for very good reasons, which apparently are still valid.
      As for the TARP, the biggest reason the banks aren't lending is that they simply don't trust anyone. They know that they inflated the value of their assets, so they (correctly) assume that everyone else has too. Of course, putting the TARP money on the balance sheet is useful "window dressing".

      --
      In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
    3. Re:Citation, please by dlcarrol · · Score: 4, Informative

      With respect, classical economics and Austrian economics are not quite the same thing, and the Austrian school of economics explains this quite well.

      Notice any similarities here? No, it's not a perfect fit, but it's the best I could do on short notice.

      No one is saying that these models have nothing to do with malinvestment, but it's likely the inputs to the model are also obfuscated by distorted monetary signals

    4. Re:Citation, please by Dunbal · · Score: 4, Insightful

      With respect, classical economics and Austrian economics are not quite the same thing

            Sorry, I'm not an economist. Therefore if I said something incorrect through ignorance I apologize. I merely wished to emphasize that truly we live in interesting times. I think it's when the world (and especially the consumer intensive US) finds out we've bumped into the limits of our resources on this planet. We can't all have an SUV. We can't all waste electricity. We can't all have a worry free life, and independence, and a nice house, and a big screen tv, and eat in good restaurants, etc. The boom in commodity prices - in part fueled by massive demand from the BRICIT countries that are also expanding their middle classes and trying to adopt an "American" standard of living - has another side to it. Not only was demand increased - but supply is at or near maximum. There IS no more copper, there IS no more gold, platinum WILL run out in 20 years or so, etc.

            Therefore commodities (including petroleum) priced themselves right out of the market. This triggered, and is triggering, financial default from everyone who was living "the dream" on credit. And now the cards keep tumbling. Oh, we will reach a new equilibrium some day - but our population keeps expanding, and those resources keep getting more scarce.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    5. Re:Citation, please by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's without precedent.

      [citation needed]

      You didn't LOOK at the graph, did you? That's my citation.

      This is the last 2 years, with that "almost completely VERTICAL" drop.

      This is a 2 year span at 1929, that little tiny blip on the left of your zoomed out chart. Notice how it's actually more vertical than the current drop?

      This is your chart, redrawn to have a log scale vertical axis instead of linear. It looks like "now" is roughly comparable to 1938 or the early 1970s.

    6. Re:Citation, please by Technician · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, they were intertwined from the beginning, because they were the "safest" "surest" bets, and that's where all the wealth was going.

      For those who fail to learn from history and are banking on Gold, keep an eye on this overpriced security when it is time to sell. When the silver market was cornered about 25 years ago, it happened once again. If you have Gold, now is a great time to sell to greedy investors.

      Remember in any market, Buy LOW and Sell HIGH. If it is already high, don't buy. If it is already low, don't sell. Too many investors are not concerned about price, only the direction it is going. Late buyers are almost always stuck holding the bag on the way down.

      If you follow Christianity at all, there is a prediction that a bag of gold will buy a loaf of bread.

      --
      The truth shall set you free!
    7. Re:Citation, please by FiloEleven · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I keep posting the link in my sig when I feel it is appropriate, and while I fear I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, now is one of those times.

      The Crash Course is a 20-part video series, most chapters under 7 minutes long, that explores the various issues that are all coming to a head, including peak oil, world population, global warming, the money supply, and a few others. It's full of exponential curves that would be exciting except for the ceilings they are approaching at an increasingly alarming rate.

      It's pretty well put together and highly informative. If you're skeptical about all the gloom and doom because it's usually spouted by ACs, you owe it to yourself to get the information from a source far less shrill and far more credible. IMO you'll be pretty convinced after watching, and even if you're not you will certainly be better informed.

  4. Nothing wrong with models. by gravos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is nothing wrong with using a model. Models are good. They help us simplify the world so that we can understand it. For example, we have hundreds of competing climate change models that explain what is going on and predict what we should expect. We model the weather for forecasts. And so on.

    But. And it is a big but. You must know the limitations of your model. By definition, a model is a simplification of a complex phenomenon. That does not make it flawed: that makes it a model. Overreliance on the model is your fault, not the fault of the model.

    1. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      However, there are some models that are just bad. If we take your climate change model example, simply going outside and measuring the temperature, and then comparing it to a temperature you took one the same day three years in a row and then plotting the statistical trend is a very poor model. Using that model, one might assume that we have drastic global cooling going on. It doesn't matter how much you rely on that model, if you rely on it all, you're going to be dead flat wrong.

    2. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by wjh31 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Even more important that the limitations of a model are the assumtions taken in developing the model and/or feeding the data into the model, these should always be made clear to whomever the user of the model is, and it is then up to the user to decide if those assumtions are reasonable for their use of it.

    3. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Is global warming the new replacement for Godwin's Law?

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    4. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Funny

      In Nazi Germany, global warming Godwins you?

    5. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by umghhh · · Score: 4, Interesting

      it does not matter what model you use. Apparently they all created virtual worlds in big numbers (total value of derivatives and such is few times more than summed up gross domestic product of all countries on our planet) - this had to crash independently of the model - problem being that they used the same one. in other words: if all sheeple use the same model of reality then to make profit you need to use different one. Or to say it yet differently: if all sheeple do the same they create the bubble. nature of bubbles is that they burst when they reach physical limits of the stuff of which they are made. In our case it was human gullibility.

    6. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by ShakaUVM · · Score: 5, Interesting

      >>There is nothing wrong with using a model. Models are good.

      Not in economics, they're not. The book Black Swan, which should be read by anyone interested in this topic, says that the hideous lie is that people claim that "they're better than nothing", when, in fact, they're worse than not having any model at all.

      The LTC crash was caused by the founders (Nobel Laureates in Economics) having a model to quantify risk. IIRC, they used some sort of guassian model, taking the standard deviation of price movement as "risk". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Scholes#Black.E2.80.93Scholes_model) This of course looked good until, quite suddenly, it wasn't and there was an event that their model predicted shouldn't have happened within the lifetime of the universe (that's the problem with using gaussians instead of cauchy curves or other fat-tailed distributions) and the company crashed and burned, and did a lot of collateral damage as well.

      From the wikipedia article on LTC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management): Merrill Lynch observed in its annual reports that mathematical risk models, "may provide a greater sense of security than warranted; therefore, reliance on these models should be limited."

    7. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by BrokenHalo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You don't need an MBA to know there are bust-boom cycles.

      You also don't need an MBA to know that there is a limit to the number of balls a juggler can keep in the air at any time before he drops one. And when one ball drops, the whole thing falls apart. As the truism goes, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it...

    8. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      And it is a big but. You must know the limitations of your model.

      Is that you, Sir Mix-A-Lot?

    9. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Apparently you do need an MBA to think that growth can be infinite and profit generated indefinitely.

    10. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by wezeldog · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yes. And he cannot lie, apparently.

    11. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by timeOday · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not clear to me that computer models have made bubbles any more severe or frequent than they were beforehand. Depressions/recessions/"panics" were fairly common in US history until the great depression. After than govt adopted a stronger approach to regulating the markets through the money supply which decreased the frequency of recessions.

    12. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by corbettw · · Score: 2, Funny

      There is nothing wrong with using a model.

      I'll say, especially if you're a single guy just looking for a good time.

      --
      God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
    13. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by renoX · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The things is are the exception of a model 'normal' vs 'abnormal'?

      Benoit Mandelbrot and other think that the economy is 'wildly random', see this 2006 paper:
      http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5372968a-ba82-11da-980d-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=77a9a0e8-b442-11da-bd61-0000779e2340.html

      Current crisis is one more proof that economy is 'wildly random' and that a stock market is even less reliable than a casino (where the randomness here is just 'normal'), so stock markets are like adding oil in a fire, they make crisis worse..
      So the question is: is-it possible to have capitalism without a stock market or with a very regulated one?

      I think that this is possible, but that it will take many crisis as the current one before the strict regulations start to kick in..

    14. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by e2d2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Considering how much impact human emotion and irrationality has on the markets I would tend to agree. Is today's bubble burst any more significant because of their use of models? Not really. The simple fact is they used a tool incorrectly and in their job, instead of sawing a finger off, they lose billions. But what drove this? Human emotions. Perhaps one day we can accurately model this, but I'm not so sure.

    15. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by maraist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I disagree. A model defines a static or pseduo-static system. It takes the non-linearities out of a system to make them as close to a linear, 1st order or 2nd order system as much as possible, such that you can produce matrices of inputs to outputs. All models also are accompanied by regions of legitimacy.. Namely the non-linear (or super non-linear) components press close to zero in these regions. Outside the regions, those non-linearities become too much 'error' for the model to be valid. Ideally, you can use separate models for different regions, and you have a nice continuum. But for that, you need to be able to first measure a region parameter.

      The problem here is that you're talking about a model for an investment strategy that is inherently non-deterministic, non-linear and more importantly recursively adaptive. The region you're operating in, is part of the outcome variables.

      Consider 3 investors each with equivalent information systems (including risk modeling, present-valuation, and product-viability forecast, whatever).

      In a vaccum, a model, assuming a static system might be appropriate. Balance-sheets, due-dilligence, market trends, geo-politics, etc. are all valid. But consider that the other two investors have the power to effect the system. Consider that they can manipulate, propping up an industry, or willfully collapsing it (over-buying, or short-selling). By acting irrationally in the short term, they can sufficiently distort all the measureable parameters to your equation to force you to act inappropriately.

      Thus by taking a short-term hit, one of your competitors can gain a much greater long term advantage.

      Thus, KNOWING that you use certain models, allows your competitors to game the system.. Note they need to have significant resources in which to do this.. But the old addage that you need money to make money exactly applies here. Why would a wealthy person only accept 3% to 15% ROI when they can control certain markets and earn 500%.

      Now explicit market manipulation is illegal. But there is nothing illegal about gambling (sadly). Thus betting against the 'known wisdom' is perfectly legal.

      So now you have two camps.. Conservatives that trust their models (blind to the fact that people can manipulate them in the long-run). And advanced speculators who bet against the market. Over time, if one is considered unbalanced, then more and more itchy investors will switch from one side to another.. Until an equilibrium is reached where any and all metrics become meaningless - An equal proportion of investors will honor measureable data as there are people betting against the data. The raw data therefore has no material impact as to the future valuation of an asset. Note, as such a system evolves, the 'measureable' data will change over time. Namely instead of measuring the viability of a company, you measure the prospects for news and bet based on historical trends of the news outlets, not whether the news is good or not.

      This can only happen if you have a gaussian distribution of strategies. Namely a massive pool of investors operating independently with an equal liklihood of choosing one of an infinite number of strategies, such that an equal ration of buy/sell decisions could be produced.

      You can think of it as the classic "Is the poison in your drink or mine" attempt at gaming the system. Any number of strategies can be employed to decide which action is best, but the more you employ, the greater resemblance to random-decisions is created.

      The short is, no formula can adequately valuate a market that is based on such a recursively adaptive system. Determining the risk of a car accident, a plane accident, a flood, etc. These are deterministic to a large degree (short of global warming and legalizing pot). But the college that first advocated investment strategies based on such finite metrics should be unaccredited in my view. A car owner isn't trying to game the insurance market, but a stock holder or company seeking stock value is.

      --
      -Michael
    16. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Interesting

      >>>they all created virtual worlds in big numbers - [the real world] had to crash independently of the model

      Maybe we should invent a game for these bankers. World of Real Estate - where the goal is to get as many poor people into as many houses as possible, without investors learning the real housing value is only half the retail value. That way they can watch their virtual bubble go "boom" without affecting the rest of us in the real world.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    17. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by OeLeWaPpErKe · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Exactly. EVERY model that only sees rising house prices during it's data collection phase WILL assume that house prices will keep rising, and therefore tell bankers that dodgy mortgages are ok.

      After all, as long as house prices keep rising, there is NO risk whatsoever in dodgy mortgages. Either you get the stated intrest (buyer pays mortgage) or you get the price rise of the house since the buyer bought it with your money (in the case of default) ... the risk of losing money in the deal is EXACTLY the chance that house prices drop. And house prices never dropped (significantly) in over 50 years ... obviously any statistical algorithm would have told you the risk was minimal.

    18. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by commodore64_love · · Score: 3, Interesting

      >>>The LTC crash was caused by the founders (Nobel Laureates in Economics) having a model

      Smart people always think they are so smart - until they discover that they too can make mistakes. I was just watching a video wherein a Cop explained how he outsmarted a lawyer - or more correctly the lawyer outsmarted himself. The lawyer was so absolutely certain that he knew the law & couldn't be caught, but then he bragged about it ("I know you can't trace sales in flea markets, because it's forbidden by law"), and off the cop went and bought the murder weapon. The lawyer was correct about the law, but overlooked the cop's willingness to do some old-fashioned footwork. Ooops.

      No matter how smart you are, you can still make mistakes. Your real estate model had a mistake in it - as you just discovered with this market bust.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    19. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by vtcodger · · Score: 4, Informative

      Here's a link to Taleb's views on the financial crisis:

      http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html

      It's an easy read with nice quotes like " The banking system (betting AGAINST rare events) just lost > 1 Trillion dollars (so far) on a single error, more than was ever earned in the history of banking."

      and "I have nothing against economists: ... But beware: they can be plain wrong, yet frame things in a way to make you feel stupid arguing with them. So make sure you do not give any of them risk-management responsibilities."

      I can't find the quote (I think it is in "The Black Swan" or "Fooled by Randomness") but I'm pretty sure that Taleb's comment on Li's Cupola is that it is a pretty piece of mathematics whose essential problem is that it never worked for what people were trying to use it for.

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
    20. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by dcollins · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Even more important that the limitations of a model are the assumtions taken in developing the model and/or feeding the data into the model, these should always be made clear to whomever the user of the model is, and it is then up to the user to decide if those assumtions are reasonable for their use of it.

      The problem with this is most people's "just give me what I need to get the job done today" attitude. I've taught statistics in community college for a number of years, and I grapple with this a lot. Difficult enough to get people to perform the calculations for z-interval/test. Almost impossible to get them to consider the meta-analysis on whether the test is legitimate (simple random sample, assessment of normal population if sample size small, known standard deviation, etc.)

      If most days they can get away with ignoring the model's assumptions, then folks wind up doing so, and then that knowledge degenerates. Ultimately the exceptional day that they need that skill, they don't have it. People function very, very poorly in relation to very infrequent (once a generation?), catastrophic events.

      --
      We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
    21. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by perlith · · Score: 2, Interesting
      From TFA:

      "Bankers should have noted that very small changes in their underlying assumptions could result in very large changes in the correlation number."

      Any mathematical, statistical, financial, etc. model has underlying assumptions built into the model. In academia, you are taught to check the assumptions of these models before you EVER consider using them as a part of the solution. In the real-world, this doesn't happen as often as it should. Agreed, nothing wrong with the models. Wrong application of the models.

    22. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by spun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As most of the people responsible walked away with a fat profit, one could posit that they did learn from history. Why should they care that they screwed over the rest of us? Our economic system ignores externalities on that scale. Burn down a house, go to jail. Burn down the economy, get a fat bonus.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    23. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by OeLeWaPpErKe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually the assumption is this. "Lousy" mortgages are mortgages with 12% chance of default (and this was extremely high, most were something like 2% or so).

      So let's calculate what happens :
      1000 "lousy" mortgages, $200000/house, profit if fully paid back = $20000, over 20 years, profit in case of default = value of house (which rose about 1% per year on average). Default occurs "on average" after 1 year.

      So let's see :

      Initial investment : 1000 * -$200000 = -200000000
      Income from defaults : 120 * ( $200000 + 1% * $200000) = $24240000
      Income from success : 880 * ( $200000 + $20000 ) = $24240000

      Total profit : $24240000

      I dare you to find the flaw in these numbers. Yet there was a flaw. Without an education in statistics you will not see this coming, and even if you do, it's not trivial at all :

      That 12% failure rate was non-uniformly distributed. So what happened ? First 10 to 15 years nobody defaulted, resulting in a house price hike that was a lot higher than anticipated (and therefore further increasing the profits and decreasing the risk to the banks), and then, after 16 years of tiny amounts of failure, huge amounts of people started defaulting all at once, causing a massive decrease in house prices.

      This is where the theory of "let's just support the banks for one year and they'll pull through" theory comes from. IF default rates drop massively it will work.

      So why did this break the banks ? Well due to hedge funds. Hedge funds are the equivalent of using borrowed money in a casino. If you win, it multiplies your winnings. If you lose, it multiplies your losses. When a small loss accumulated, it was massively multiplied (as in a factor of 1000 was not rare) by hedge fund managers. Whether the "smaller" original loss would have been enough to topple banks, we'll never know. One thing is for certain, all these "oh I predicted it" hedge fund managers are like the devil laughing at his victims burning ... they're not innocent of the crash, at all. They're the maffia bosses who massively profit by making loans they KNEW the debtors wouldn't be able to repay.

      And now they act all "I told you so".

      They saw a disaster coming, and by worsening the disaster, they made their fortune. These people should be hanged from the highest available flagpole, not celebrated.

      Fantastic flash explanation

    24. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by Sloppy · · Score: 4, Informative

      EVERY model that only sees rising house prices during it's data collection phase WILL assume that house prices will keep rising, and therefore tell bankers that dodgy mortgages are ok.

      This is why you can't build a model by looking at a list of numbers. You have to actually understand the source of the data. For example, to go back to the weather example: you can't forecast temperature by looking at a temperature log. You have to actually know something about the sun and oceans and wind and stuff. ;-)

      It is foolish to look at investments abstractly. They're not just numbers. They're businesses (or houses or whatever) and they exist in the real world.

      Some people say if you diversify enough, then you add so much noise that the sum becomes abstract, and you can start to treat it as a statistical problem rather than an intell problem. *sigh* Yeah, I guess you might get away with that.

      For a while.

      --
      As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
    25. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Burn down the economy get a big fat check is about right.

      The problem with slow justice, is that it gives the appearance of no justice. Bernie Madoff will, in all likelyhood, die without spending a day in PMITA Prison.

      And his family will keep the benefit of all the Billions that disappeared, because all the assets in trusts and such are untouchable by the law, even if they are ill gained. That is what a trust was created exactly to protect. Trusts are nothing more than legal money laundering.

      And there is nothing wrong with making a profit. The problem isn't profit, or even greed. The problem is that people will use the rules in place to screw others and hide the loot. It doesn't matter what the rules are, and the more complex the rules, the easier it is to hide malfeasance. More rules don't stop it. People will do evil regardless of the rules.

      Bad people don't follow the rules, and will use the rules as an excuse to do bad. They use the rules to take advantage of others. Once people realize that rules are for the law abiding, not the law breakers, then we can get rid of all the stupid rules which don't prevent anything.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    26. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by peragrin · · Score: 5, Informative

      Maybe you should get the facts before opening your mouth. Less than 5% of the mortages failed.

      The banks however over extended themselves with the hope of using future profit to pay past due debt. Think of it this way. Balance your budget so you can pay all your bills. Now go max out your credit cards, take a second mortage and buy a couple more cars. Does it make sense? If so you have a future in banking, or government.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    27. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by spun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's not even just that justice is slow. The rich and powerful let guys like Bernie screw people over so that when shit like this goes down, they have a sacrificial lamb. The plebes get to watch a perp walk, and the real bad guys get off scot-free.

      The thing about rules is that if you don't have any at all, the bad guys will simply claim they did nothing wrong. If you have too many, it's also a problem. But fixing the problem requires agreement on how many is too many, and which ones are stupid.

      The bad guys know that with too few, or no rules, they can get away with even more. They like people like you, who do their cheer-leading for them. If we did away with all rules, you'd be some fat cat's garden slave.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    28. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by nine-times · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Trying to blame this economic/financial meltdown on the housing market is like trying to blame the cards when you lose at 3-card monte. Sure, they're involved in the problem, but the root of the problem is the game itself, and the guy behind the game.

      If it weren't housing, there would have been some other bull crap that everyone poured their money into because some financial model said it couldn't fail. There still would have been a bubble, and worse yet people would have still been involved in back room deals that amount to high-stakes gambling involving more money than anyone in the world actually has.

    29. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >>>If it weren't housing, there would have been some other bull crap that everyone poured their money into

      Right. In 2000 it was internet companies. In 1991 it was savings-and-loans. And today, it's houses. They overvalued at $200,000 average when the true historical value is only $120,000. It was a bubble and it burst. Housing values plummeting (dropping about $40,000) is what caused banking stocks to lose value as investors fled.

      Also you can't blame everything on the model. If a banker lies on forms (creating income the buyer does not have), that too is to blame. So too are commissions which create the desire to make a sale and pocket the money, even if the deal is extremely risky.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    30. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by cc_pirate · · Score: 3, Informative

      You are wrong to blame only the democrats.

      The biggest share of the blame goes to Phil Gramm and two bills that GOP idiot got passed.

      1. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that rolled back the 1933 reforms and let us just REPEAT the same problem... morons... absolute morons

      2. The Commodity Futures Act of 2000, which made CDOs and CDSs legal even though they were ILLEGAL in almost all states since the 1907 crash, and for good reason..

      Then lastly, blame the GOP controlled SEC which allowed banks to leverage 33 to 1!!!!!!! in 2004.

      Talk about absolute insanity. Nothing the Dems did in encouraging low cost home ownership is even in the same ball park as the stupidity I listed above.

      --

      "There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur

    31. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by sgeye · · Score: 5, Informative

      Might want to check your numbers again. Bush ran up more debt that every President before him COMBINED. He came in with around $4 Trillion in debt and left with around $12 Trillion in debt. Obama has a long ways to go before he gets into Bush territory. In what fucking fantasy land did Iraq and Afghanistan cost $100 Billion? Shit we flew $125 Billion in cash in on pallets to hand out to contractors, most of that money is completely unaccounted for.

    32. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by sjames · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's even worse than slow justice, it's NO justice.

      If I stole $1000, I would be in jail awaiting trial. He stole billions and he is confined to his mansion, A situation many people dream of, but alas, will never attain.

      His family is set for life. At least some of the families of those he swindled are struggling to get by. Retirements that won't happen, college educations that will be put off for years or just won't happen, moving from a nice house to a rathole apartment, etc.

      The rules are necessary and make good sense. The problenm is that the rules don't get applied to you if you have enough money, even if you have it because you broke the rules. The key (beyond being a sociopath) is to get away with it long enough to have enough money when you get caught.

    33. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by QuantumPion · · Score: 2, Interesting

      According to the all-knowing wikipedia, the government debt increased from $6e12 to $9e12 during Bush's term. However, this was during a time of huge growth in the GDP. Looking at the graph as a percentage of GDP, government debt remained fairly constant.

      I'm not at all a fan of Bush's big government spending, he should have reduced spending while he had the chance. That being said, I find it ridiculously hypocritical for Bush pundits to complain about his government spending then but not Obama's drastic spending now. Bush may have increased the government's debt by 50% during his 8 years in office, but Obama has increased it by 50% in his first 60 days, AND during a huge decrease in the GDP due to the recession.

    34. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by Kevin+Stevens · · Score: 2, Interesting

      peragrin, you are wrong.

      The current delinquency rate is over 6% for residential real estate and skyrocketing with no apparent end in sight. http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/02/fed-delinquency-rates-rise-sharply-in.html

      This is relatively new data, but I have been following the mortgage markets closely since the credit crisis began as ARM/and Option ARM mortgages reset and the situation is certainly going to deteriorate a great deal.

    35. Re:Nothing wrong with models. by commodore64_love · · Score: 2

      He who criticizes offers no solutions, because he has none.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  5. One word by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Diversity.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
    1. Re:One word by D+Ninja · · Score: 2, Interesting

      However, you could still be making money right now if you know what you are doing, but for most people, their 401(k) is kind of a "buy and ignore" type operation.

      Any ideas or insight into how? There is only so many options offered in a typical 401(k). I don't see how you can say what you just said. Further explanation would be much appreciated.

  6. Looks like a pyramid by jace48 · · Score: 3, Funny
  7. Or there's my financial formulae by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    - Don't spend the money you don't have
    - Don't do credit unless you absolutely have to

    I know I know, Wall Street are these big finance hotshots who do complicated things that have nothing to do with personal finances, but what is it they do apart from speculating and playing with money they don't have, or other people's money? They just hide that simple fact under abconce financial constructs, but that's all they do in the end.

    Bring back some morals sanity in the credit business and there won't be anymore crisis of this magnitude. No need for math here...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Or there's my financial formulae by internerdj · · Score: 2, Insightful

      While I agree with you on a personal finance level and that a lack of moral sanity is a problem on the larger scale, the personal goals at a larger level would constrict the economy. In fact it is what is happening right now: the banks unsure of what their holdings are really valued at are unwilling to loan money. Due to that unwillingness to loan, many businesses are struggling to obtain the money they don't have yet, but businesses rely on credit to at the very least even out the financial bumps in the road so they can pay their workers a steady paycheck.

    2. Re:Or there's my financial formulae by Abcd1234 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      - Don't spend the money you don't have

      So... no mortgages for anyone, then? Or small business loans? Or raising funds for large capital expenditures (say, building a new chip fab)?

      - Don't do credit unless you absolutely have to

      Wait... doesn't that fly in the face of your first "rule"?

      Here's an interesting rule about absolutisms: they're rarely all that absolute.

      As an aside, leveraged investment, which includes all the things I listed above, among many other things, is a very good thing. The problem is, your average bank in the US was leveraged 30:1, which is absolutely frickin' insane. Fortunately, this crisis will force businesses and people back down to more healthy leverage ratios.

    3. Re:Or there's my financial formulae by Hatta · · Score: 2, Insightful

      While I agree with you on a personal finance level and that a lack of moral sanity is a problem on the larger scale, the personal goals at a larger level would constrict the economy.

      No. Responsible behavior by our financial institutions would not constrict the economy. It would simply not artificially inflate the growth of the economy. This is a good thing, artificial growth cannot continue forever, and we all suffer when the market corrects. Slow and steady wins the race.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  8. Not Wall Street. Us. by computersareevil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It isn't killing Wall Street. Those jokers are getting $billions$ in free money.

    It's killing us, the people who work for a living and have to provide all those $billions$ or suffer the inflationary consequences when the Feds just print it.

  9. Picking up pennies in front of bulldozers by ahodgkinson · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Engineers are taught: Your model is only a model, and does not necessarily capture the complete behavior of the thing being modeled. You must understand the limitations of the model.

    That Gaussian curves are a poor model for unlikely events has been known for quite some time. This is best explained by Nassim Taleb in the following books:

    • Fooled by Randomness
    • The Black Swan

    His main thesis is that the markets are essentially random and are basically impossible to predict in any meaningful way. Further there are unlikely unknown unknowns can cannot be predicted until the they occur, usually with disastrous consequences.

    --
    ---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
    1. Re:Picking up pennies in front of bulldozers by nedlohs · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Except that the current economic woes don't fit into Taleb's "Black Swan" category. It was obvious that his was going to happen to anyone with one brain cell 5 years ago, and to anyone with two brain cells a decade ago.

      I'm pretty sure I heard an interview with Taleb in which he mentioned this. Of course his strategy of investing to break even in the expected conditions and make out like a bandit when a black swan appears would have done very well as risk was repriced.

    2. Re:Picking up pennies in front of bulldozers by Wite_Noiz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As someone who works with traders, I'd say that the randomness/unpredictability of the markets is part of the reason *why* traders are so reliant on their models.
      Otherwise, it's all just blind gambling (which it isn't far off, anyway).
      The advent of full on algo trading means that random events in the market have the ability to wipe out tons of capital because the models predict (e.g.) a global crash when it's just a blip. (Extreme example)

      The other part of the problem is that traders are nowadays just glorified clerks in that all (well, 90%+) of the actual calculation and predictive work is done by complex platforms (or Excel), so they don't really care or have exposure to the real risks behind their trading.
      Coupled with the huge bonuses they used to get (I'm in London where bonuses are being denied; is it the same elsewhere?) as long as they showed *quantity* of trades, it was always a recipe for disaster.

    3. Re:Picking up pennies in front of bulldozers by bfrpsw · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "All models are wrong, but some are useful" - George Box http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_E._P._Box

    4. Re:Picking up pennies in front of bulldozers by Comatose51 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think you may have misrepresented his views or oversimplified them. Part of Taleb's claim is that these models are based on historical data which doesn't account for future disastrous events. He gives the example of a turkey, who having been fed for many days, would conclude that the humans is his friends based on its historical data. He's right up until the day before Thanksgiving. Worse yet, these models give traders a misguided sense of security so they make huge bets that would give them pennies for days and take away millions or billions of dollars when that one in 1,000,000,000 event happens. The problem is that the probability for the disaster was based on historical data, which haven't even recorded such a disaster. Worse yet, he states that the thing these data and model are suppose to represent is constantly being change and manipulated, ie. people make investment decisions based on the models, which then affects the model itself. His essential thesis is that people don't account for Black Swans. People see a bunch of white swans but have never seen a black one so they conclude that all swans must be white. In short, most of the traders on Wall Street are not familiar with Popper's philosophy of science. They think they're doing science and "finacial engineering" when all they're doing are making bad bets.

      --
      EvilCON - Made Famous by /.
    5. Re:Picking up pennies in front of bulldozers by Chris+Burke · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If they are random then why do they predict economic change with 100% accuracy?

      HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

      *gasp gasp*

      HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

      *pant pant*

      HAHHAHAHA, oh God that's rich. Seriously, you meant that? HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

      *wipes tears from eyes*

      No other reaction is possible for such a statement. Is this a delayed posting from 2007? Not that it wouldn't be equally laughable, but at least it was conceivable to maintain the self-delusion that it isn't. Today? You're saying the economy is 100% predictable, and you're saying this today.

      HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
  10. It wasn't Li's fault. by Samschnooks · · Score: 3, Insightful

    One reason was that the outputs came from "black box" computer models and were hard to subject to a commonsense smell test. Another was that the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula's weaknesses, weren't the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number. That was the problem.

    There you have it. The managers making the decisions didn't know what it all meant and the guys using the model didn't adequately explain the model's limitations.

    1. Re:It wasn't Li's fault. by smellsofbikes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >The managers making the decisions didn't know what it all meant and the guys using the model didn't adequately explain the model's limitations.

      Or the managers didn't understand their explanations -- or more likely yet, didn't *want* to understand their explanations.
      This doesn't look fundamentally different than the Challenger explosion: the technical staff knows there's a problem, keeps saying that there's a problem, but their upper management is invested in there not being a problem. It's really difficult to explain something to someone whose job depends on ideas that conflict with what you're explaining.

      --
      Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
  11. Ironic by kauttapiste · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In a way ironic that a guy from rural china comes to play, lives the american dream of wealth and glory, and (partly) causes the most massive failure of free market economics in the history.

  12. yeah...not so good by portscan · · Score: 4, Informative

    An interesting article, for sure. The issue with the Gaussian Copula model for pools of mortgages in CDOs is how sensitive they are to the assumptions of the model. If, for example, the annual growth rate of home prices is 2% instead of 10%, things look tremendously different. If correlations between housing prices in different cities is 50% instead of 10% -- disaster. The lack of stress testing of these models (checking what the results are for different inputs into the model) was a huge issue. Even if a model is decent (which in principle, copula models are), if they are too sensitive to inputs, then the prices it produces are not trustworthy. If the proper uncertainty was taken into consideration, then perhaps everyone would have been a little less gung-ho about CDOs.

    Like the (worthless) Value-at-Risk figure, the (also pretty worthless in the end) Gaussian Copula was "easy" to understand. Given that the dynamics of financial markets are not simple and easy to understand, reliance on simple models that are easy to explain to the MBAs is probably not the best idea.

  13. Similar to a hedge fund? by ProfM · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This story reminds me of "Long-Term Capital Management" story back in the late 1990's.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

    These guys did the EXACT same thing using computer models to predict what funds they should be investing in so that they never have a loss ...

    Unfortunately, they were bailed out, but folded in 2000.

    http://www.geocities.com/eureka/concourse/8751/jurus/hf100203.htm

    There was a PBS special about these guys and the computer models they used.

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2704stockmarket.html

  14. Re:Not Wall Street. Us. by Notquitecajun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A BIG part of the problem is Washington's tendency to reward economic losers at the expense of the people who know what they're doing, and I'm NOT just talking about the poor. There are plenty of the high-salary types who have some sort of governmental loophole or backing that saves them when they screw a big company up.

    It's one reason we don't need to be bailing out bad companies, and instead rewarding or backing up the good ones with incentives and tax cuts so that they can really succeed and push forward.

  15. brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain by conureman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My grandfather woulda thought this guy was a Red infiltrator. Good job if he was.

    --
    The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
  16. Thou shall not calculate behaviour by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.
    It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. This view, which is often quite naively accepted as required by scientific procedure, has some rather paradoxical consequences. We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant.

    Hayek. Nobel Prize Lecture, 1974.

  17. Don't Blame the Equation by mothlos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This seems to be a popular story for the past few weeks, but it is a mistake to blame the statistical method used. The problem wasn't that they were all using the equaton, it is that they were all mis-using the equation. All statistical tools can fail to be sensitive to certain aspects which may be critical to an application.

    People in finance applied these statistical tools believing that they would be able to master risk with them. Unfortunately, they made assumptions that certain things would continue to be the same in the future, plugged the information into the equation, and now science was telling them that everything would be alright. If everybody on Wall Street was making decisions based on the Magic 8 Ball would we blame the ball or the foolishness of those misapplying it?

  18. slightly inaccurate by operand · · Score: 2, Informative

    FTA: "The reason that ratings agencies and investors felt so safe with the triple-A tranches was that they believed there was no way hundreds of homeowners would all default on their loans at the same time."

    The problem wasn't that the Triple A accounts were defaulting rather Moody's and other companies were stamping these ratings while they were combined with Triple B and other more riskier loans. All it took is several loans to fail while rotting the entire bushel and therefore the Investor is stuck with securities that have no value.

    --
    string.Empty();
  19. Yeah right. by msormune · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Complete BS. The Wall Street knew all along the bubble would burst, and cashed in all the time while knowing it. In essence, they kept milking while perfectly well knowing it would come to a disaster.

    There's a crisis every 10-15 years. Huge crisis in every 30 years. How can some one be that gullible as to believe the economics would NOT see this coming? Of course they did, but saying and doing something about it would be bad business. It would scare off the suckers... who end up paying the bill.

  20. Hmm.. by OneSmartFellow · · Score: 2


    1.) Encourage Joe the delivery man to re-mortgage up to %125 of his property value
    2.) Transfer the mortgage to the in-house hedge fund.
    3.) Encourgae Joe the delivery man to use his funds (from the re-mortgage) to purchase shares in the hedge fund
    4.) ???
    5.) Profit



    Sorry, I'm new to this meme.

  21. Re:G+A+M+B+L+I+N+G by BrokenHalo · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think it would be good to bring back capital gains taxes on profits that are made on short term investments.

    You don't have them? Here in Australia, we pay CGT on any capital gain, but there is a 50% discount on that if you have had the investments for more than 2 years.

  22. Happy square root day! by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The love of money is the square root of all evil.

    This formula may have and probably did help crash the world's stock markets (yesterday's Dow Jones was HALF of its worth at its high last June), but the reality is that high energy prices drained everyone's wallets.

    When Bush took office, gasoiline here in Springfield was $1 per gallon. At Wall Street's high last summer it was nearly $4.50, over four times as high. We talk about elders living on a "fixed income" but the fact is almost all wage earners' incomes are fixed. We can't demand raises or overtime and have to live within our means. But when that $20 per week gasoline budget quadruples to $80 per week, with heating and electric costs going up as well, that takes money out of other aspects of the economy. Sooner or later people are over their heads and behind on bills, and things spiral out of control.

    The result of that and other factors is what you see now.

    Happy square root day, everyone.

  23. Diversity is good, 'mmkaay? by Max+Romantschuk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Any sufficiently complex system should be heterogeneous, so that not all parts of the system can fail due to the same flaw.

    Any homogeneous system will inevitably be at greater risk of failure due to a flaw in the common "gene pool" so to speak.

    Biology, computers, economics, politics... I could go on.

    --
    .: Max Romantschuk :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/
  24. Consumer Credit Report by chelsel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "produced a single number to characterize risk" isn't this what Equifax, TransUnion, Experian and others have been doing for decades?

  25. Re:Economic Stimulus by conureman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In China, they're using this slack time to upgrade the infrastructure, closing down old inefficient factories and building new ones with government CASH. Who's winning this round?

    --
    The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
  26. Correlation's revenge by UnixUnix · · Score: 2, Funny

    As if it weren't bad enough to be using skewed or insufficient inputs, we also had everybody doing the exact same thing -- seeking a talisman to exorcise danger and legitimize universal greed.

    And then it came. Correlation's revenge!

  27. Re:tinfoil by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, maybe. If we use the Dow Jones Industrial Average (zoom out to Max for this discussion) as a measure of the economy (you could definitely do worse), the interesting thing is if we draw the trendline "flat" from about 1995 to today, and base that on the more or less steady trendline from 1985 to 1995, you'll notice that we're actually right where we should be right about now. The DJIA grew wayyyy too fast from about 1996 to 2007 (where the real peak is).

    I attribute this skyrocketing economy to a couple of different phenomena: a) The dotcom boom and b) some external factors that I'm uncertain of, but I'm guessing there is some manipulation somewhere. You could be right. I also think it is interesting that current busted economy occurred shortly after the retiring of Alan Greenspan in 2006, who was Fed chairman from 1987 on.

    Look at the violent and volatile growth between 1995 and 2000, and again from 2005 to 2007. We were due for crash, for sure.

    It's very interesting, because from the 1970s to about 1995, the DJIA grew very steadily. After 1995, it was wild ride.

  28. Re:Economic Stimulus by Hemogoblin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In China, they're using this slack time to upgrade the infrastructure, closing down old inefficient factories and building new ones with government CASH. Who's winning this round?

    Not the millions of migrant chinese workers who have lost their jobs, which will probably also cause civil unrest. Also, the Chinese holding trillions of dollars in U.S. treasuries will also be slightly annoyed when the U.S. government inflates away their debts.

    Finally, the vast majority of China's stimulus package was already announced before this major recession. You have the order backwards.

  29. When I think of Wall Street... by Ronald+Dumsfeld · · Score: 2, Insightful

    When I think of Wall Street, one of the first things that springs to mind is a photo I saw sometime late last year. In it, a protester is holding a home-made sign with the text, "Jump you bastards".

    They didn't jump, and I have only seen one or two articles mentioning trader or banker suicides.

    I can only conclude that those working on Wall Street are so utterly detached from the riskier-than-roulette gambling they were engaged in, that the losses are meaningless to them. It wasn't their money, they had no real stake in any investment being viable in the long-term, and - what's worse - is I see zero effort to move away from the "must profit in the next quarter" philosophy.

    I really don't care about any 'magic formula', and I doubt you can squarely lay the blame for the current problems at the foot of any. The issue is the drive to profit right now.

    What is perhaps more worrying for the average person is that governments have been sucked into this mindset too - but perhaps not surprising when the only people who can get elected are those who have made the money to campaign from their own short-term investments, or by accepting backing from others who did so in exchange for perpetuating the system.

    --
    Where's the Kaboom?
    There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
  30. Two sides to every trade by Lawrence_Bird · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So if the Street were all one way (hypothetically) then the
    counterparts are the otherway.

    The genesis of this debacle lies as much with the buy side
    - pension funds, mutual funds, etc who were willing to buy
    anything so long as they got a pickup of 15-25bp over the
    comparable treasuries. In effect, they asked for this
    stuff and they got it.

    As to VaR - its a great way to model relatively stable
    markets and to quantify short term risks of a large move
    based on recent historical returns, volatility and asset
    correlations. It's not meant to predict trends nor to
    quantify 'what if the market for X tanks every day for Y
    months'. Thats what managers and traders are for - to
    realize there has been some change, perhaps fundamental,
    which will have a long term negative effect on their
    positions and to take what action is necessary to reduce
    that risk. Instead, they froze.

  31. The Real Formula that Killed us All by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The real root of this problem is and has been the federal government all along, and I'm not just talking about between the years 2000 and 2008. This goes back all the way to the 1970s, the Carter Administration. A very good article to read: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/29/miron.bailout/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

  32. This Is Their Bullshit Cover Story by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, "complex mathematical model". Tell it to the judge.

    They did indeed use this model, and the work of many other PhD mathematicians, physicists, and other geniuses. But any of the bankers could have looked at this whole class of derivatives from mortgages and seen the basics that make the model a joke. They sold millions of mortgages and other loans to people using artificially low initial interest, to get people to take the loans, but which ballooned to rates they couldn't afford, so they'd have to default. Inevitably, a large percentage would certainly default. A losing bet overall for banks holding those loans. Meanwhile, each bad loan was "good" because the banks could sell many times the number of derivatives on it. Which was "good" because they got paid for the derivatives they sold, but was much more "bad" because the derivatives would cost the issuing bank many times more when it came due. The derivatives came due when the mortgages defaulted. Which was inevitable.

    So whatever "gaussian copula" model they use to convince each other it was good, basic business sense would have insisted that the business was bad, horribly bad. These bankers don't get paid for discovering new math, they get paid for their years of experience and business sense. So they should have laughed this model out of the boardroom, even if they didn't understand why it was wrong. They should have known it was wrong, as the past few years proved beyond any doubt. But they embraced it instead, and centuries old banks like Lehman Brothers have gone down, taking us with them (and no end in sight).

    Because ultimately, the model was a way to delay the costs of a business that paid some fat revenue up front. Since bankers are paid in huge bonuses for the initial year of revenue, and then leave before the bills come due , they got paid to make those bad deals, because they paid off up front, before costing many times more their benefit a few years later. By which time the bankers are gone with their early bonuses. Which have a lot more buying power when the economy collapses, and everyone else is holding merely the debt they created.

    Nice work, if you can get it. Since they ruined the banking system and everything else, no one can get any work at all.

    These people are holding the money. Their bonuses often equal the losses that destroy their bank. The government should take back that money to pay for fixing and repairing some of the mess they made. "Fiduciary responsibility" is a requirement of bank execs, and these violated that by the $TRILLIONS. Make them pay for what they did. That's a simple model anyone can understand. Not just a complex conjob to hide behind.

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    make install -not war

  33. Oh Please... by Arthur+B. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There's nothing advanced or innovative about a gaussian copula. It's a very simple mathematical trick, it doesn't say anything about finance in itself. It's a programming trick to go from a uniform distribution on a cube (easy to generate, run rnd() for each coordinate) to a multivariate gaussian with a specific covariance matrix. The way to do it is cholesky decomposition. This is OLD stuff.

    Li's paper is a clever way to measure default correlation using correlation matrixes from asset returns. It's quite clever, and yes it's a pretty good model (more on that later)

    This is not journalism, this is a bit of shit where the author decided having an "evil formula" would be cool. Look there's an "equal" sign, how can they be so sure... pffffffffffffffff.

    I said it was a good model, yet it's been proven wrong hasn't it? Well, first of all, what has been shown to be wrong is the guesstimate of correlation that was input into the model. G.I.G.O

    Plus, if you price a fixed income product and it produces higher than market return, you will borrow short term funds to invest them in it. In a free market that quickly drains the pool of saving and raises short term interest rate. Sure you end up losing money but no catastrophe. In a federal reserve system, well the short term rate stays what the fed says it should be and everyone piles on the arbitrage, creating sky high leveraged position.

    Yeah the formula can be misleading, but for a true catastrophe, you need a federal reserve.

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    \u262D = \u5350
    1. Re:Oh Please... by Arthur+B. · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There seems to be this implicit assumption amongst the pure free-market guys that there is no moral or ethical component to economic activities, as if there weren't, at the core of it all human beings who have the ability to suffer as a result of outcomes there.

      The case for the free market *is* ethics. Respect for property rights imply an unregulated free market and strongly suggest capitalism.

      The idea being that there is that the fully unfettered market is something like a magic clockwork that always produces optimum outcomes if just allowed to be be "free".

      I took the position that a free market would have produced losses and inefficiencies due to mispricing of correlations, how is that descriving a "magic clockwork" ?

      humans, who will lie, cheat, steal, believe in fairy tales, and engage in many non-logical behaviors produce a system that tends to generate superior outcomes for those in a position to manipulate or at least take advantage of the mechanism, at the expense of much larger groups that do not have this advantage.

      Of course. Especially government.

      This disaster wasn't caused by having a reserve banking system

      There's a strong case for this theory though, it's not an ad hoc theory trying to fit the facts, it's a been here for more than 70 years and fully fits the facts. I suggest you open Hayek or Mises.

      Very simply put, when the short term interest rate is artificially prevented from rising, carry trades will take enormous proportions, something they wouldn't be able to do if they had to raise short term capital from a free market in lending.

      it was caused by one of the Seven Sins - greed.

      Yeah yeah. You just said human are always greedy, so greed's explaining power is 0.

      Price signals allow decentralized coordination of economic agents. If you mess with that (set the short term interest rate), you blow up that coordination. The only persons to blame are those who set up the system in this way... and no need to look at the consequences for that, the very way it was set up, through force, violence, fraud is enough to condemn them.

      If you don't expect, and then enforce societally this expectation for ethical behavior, it is impossible to produce a market system operated by humans that will avoid busts and bubbles.

      All bubbles in history have been related to credit expansion. What does that tell you?

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      \u262D = \u5350
    2. Re:Oh Please... by Darby · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The case for the free market *is* ethics. Respect for property rights imply an unregulated free market and strongly suggest capitalism.

      You're missing a critically important point here.

      There are unregulated markets, and there is the theoretical ideal of a free market. These are not the same thing. Most blatantly, the first can actually exist in reality, the second can't ever possibly exist.

      Now, I think that a free market is a good asymptotic goal, but you really need to understand that it is nothing but a theoretical abstraction and can't exist in reality anymore than the frictionless planes of high school physics can.

      Now, apart from making that huge but common error, you seem to be saying that even if such a thing as a free market were possible that it would necessarily be the same thing as an unregulated market. This is also completely false.

      The inevitable end result of an unregulated market is about as far away from the ideal of a free market as its possible to get. Now, it's important to remember that the same thing is true of over regulated markets, which fact you don't seem to have an issue with. Given that, it's surprising that you have a problem grasping the fact that unregulated markets are necessarily incredibly unfree.

      Here's a simple example which should make the problem crystal clear to you.

      Assume I'm the CEO of Widgets Inc. We've been in the widget business for a long time and have done well financially, but we're the big dog. Now assume that you start up a company, NewWidgets Inc. with some great new innovations in widget making which allow you to greatly undercut my best price.

      Now, in an *unregulated* market, what do you think would happen?

      Well, I would take some tiny part of my large amount of funds and hire some goons to go torch your office, rape your family to death in front of you and then burn you alive.

      Now without some form of regulation on the market, that would be the end of the story and most likely the end of any attempts by anyone to compete with me.

      Now, you might try to claim that laws against murder aren't regulations of the market, but given the example I put forward, you'd quite obviously be incorrect as those regulations had the effect of regulating the market. The original reason for the establishment of anti-murder laws is totally irrelevant to the fact that it is a market regulation.

      Now, once you realize that simple fact, it quickly becomes obvious that an unregulated market is inevitably a complete disaster. The only rational debate is one on what sort of regulations do the most to make the markets approach the theoretical ideal of a free market, rather than on whether or not any regulations are necessary. Some regulations are quite obviously necessary, but bad enough regulations could easily approach the disaster guaranteed by no regulations.

  34. Let's not forget by gloryhallelujah · · Score: 3, Interesting

    amidst all this chatter about economics and models that what we're really talking about here is gambling. The wealthy made bets on red and black and then they bought insurance on their bets and the bets of others. Ultimately, they gambled that the Casino (America) and it's croupiers (AIG, Morgan Stanley, Citi, etc.) had assets sufficient to pay off the bets. They were wrong and they lost but refuse to hand over their chips. The real problem is that we don't have a couple of guys with baseball bats to do the collections.

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    The Turing test cuts both ways
  35. Greed by Arthur+B. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Blaming greed for a financial crisis is like blaming gravity in a plane crash.

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    \u262D = \u5350
  36. Preposterous! by Comboman · · Score: 5, Insightful
    nature of bubbles is that they burst when they reach physical limits of the stuff of which they are made. In our case it was human gullibility.

    Preposterous! Human gullibility is one of the few things that has no limits.

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    Support Right To Repair Legislation.
    1. Re:Preposterous! by markov_chain · · Score: 2, Funny

      I didn't used to think so, but yeah, you're right. You convinced me.

      --
      Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
  37. Models had nothing to do with it by TheWizardOfCheese · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The contribution of mathematical models to the present crisis has been vastly overblown. The breast-beating and mea culpas from the likes of Derman and Wilmott are self-flattering: after all, if you caused the problem, you must be important! In reality, the quant is at the bottom of the pecking order on most trading floors. The people who trafficked in securitized garbage did so not because they were fooled by their models, but because they were paid to. You can't tell me that the guy who lent $750,000 to a strawberry picker with $14,000 income would have thought it a good idea if he was lending his own money.

    Contrast this to LCTM, which really is an example of quants gone wrong: those guys had so much faith in their models that they not only put their own money in the game, they borrowed money to invest in themselves! They were doing the same things they had done at Salomon but they failed to appreciate the importance of being able to lean on Solly's balance sheet in times of trouble.

    As for Taleb ... puh-lease. The guy is a self-promoting windbag and his two most recent books are a waste of time. That's a shame, because he has written at least one interesting book I am aware of: Dynamic Hedging. Unfortuntely, the flaws that were present in embryo in that book - exaggerated self-regard, exaggerated criticism of others, deliberately cryptic statements meant to make the author seem clever - have grown like a tumour to consume 100% of his writing. All of Taleb's points have been made more clearly and more intelligently by other, better people. A recent example is Rebonato's Plight of the Fortune Tellers, but there are many others.

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    "The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
  38. It wasn't li's fault because money is broken. by Colin+Smith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It has been broken since 1694.

    Credit is an exponential function. Go check the national debt (in any country) for the last couple of centuries. It's an exponential growth curve. Credit has an exponential function built in to to it. When credit is created, it is created with an equivalent amount of debt attached, which pays interest.

    So you have : credit on one side | debt + interest on the other.

    So in order to work AT ALL, the supply of credit must grow exponentially every year to pay the interest on the previous year's debt. If it doesn't, there is a monetary collapse as the debt consumes the credit.

    Li's function simply allowed the process to continue until they ran out of people to lend money to. The problem has been there as long as money lenders.

     

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    1. Re:It wasn't li's fault because money is broken. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wealth isn't static. If you invest 1kg of gold into my new gold mining business, and in a year, I've mined 2kg of gold, it is easy for me to repay the debt + interest.

      The problems occur when someone lends money to someone who can't turn that credit into an "investment" that pays at least principal + interest.

      You can print as much money as you want, but if you don't create real wealth with it, you just end up with inflation.

    2. Re:It wasn't li's fault because money is broken. by shma · · Score: 2, Informative

      Go check the national debt (in any country) for the last couple of centuries. It's an exponential growth curve.

      Are you looking at debt in real dollars or debt/GDP? Because if not, even a tiny constant deficit in real dollars would look like an exponential growth curve thanks to inflation. Here's what my country's debt looks like when you plot it as a percentage of GDP over the last 15 years. Hardly an exponential curve.

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      I came here for a good argument
  39. Re:Economic Stimulus by mike2R · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Also, the Chinese holding trillions of dollars in U.S. treasuries

    You know I've been hearing this for years, so I actually looked it up. As far as I can see China "only" has about $700 billion of US government debt. A huge amount certainly, but really enough to cause the kind of financial armageddon that people talk about?

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    This sig all sigs devours
  40. Re:Economic Stimulus by vampire_baozi · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try the Chinese news sources, there were a few good pieces on Sohu and Xinlang when it was announced.

    Though, what he should say is most of the stimulus package was already planned spending- they are simply rushing the schedule. Indeed, most of our own stimulus package (and many others) are mostly made up of already-planned packages, moving future spending to now rather than upping spending too much.
    I'll dig through my history to get you citations, but much of the Chinese plan is provincial governments announcing they are breaking ground sooner rather than later, moving up a few billion in planned investments to today to absorb the newly-freed labor force from the export factories.

  41. Laying blame by Aggrav8d · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We blame the system, the oversight, the laws, the formulas... where's the article that blames the people? Where is the banker who says "mea culpa"?

  42. All models have limitations by sjbe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The book Black Swan, which should be read by anyone interested in this topic, says that the hideous lie is that people claim that "they're better than nothing", when, in fact, they're worse than not having any model at all.

    Say it with me: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful". A bad model CAN be worse than no model but it doesn't follow that all models are worse than no model. In fact it would be impossible to do anything without creating models of the world around you. You do it all the time without even being conscious of what your are doing. Newtonian physics is technically a less accurate model than Einstein's general relativity but it remains very useful for a wide variety of applications IF you understand its limitations. In the economic realm Modigliani-Miller and Black-Scholes are very useful models so long as you understand their limitations - and they do have limitations like every model.

    The LTC crash was caused by the founders (Nobel Laureates in Economics) having a model to quantify risk.

    They didn't blow up because they had a model. They blew up because they had an inappropriately applied model. LTCM applied their models which apparently worked well for the narrow field of fixed income arbitrage to other areas like equity and currency arbitrage where the models assumptions combined with their excessive appetite for risk caused a catastrophe.

    You correctly note that they failed to account adequately for extremely rare events but had they stayed within their original model parameters (fixed income arbitrage) and more reasonable levels of leverage it likely would not have been a big issue. Instead they applied their models to inappropriate financial instruments and levered up heavily which greatly compounded the problem. Worse, the financial institutions which lent them the cash failed because, like in the current financial crisis, they did not adequately consider the risks they were taking.

    1. Re:All models have limitations by ShakaUVM · · Score: 2, Interesting

      >>Say it with me: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful"
      >>Newtonian physics is technically a less accurate model than Einstein's general relativity

      Not in the world of economic models that do forecasting. Models of the physical world in various scientific fields are fine. Models that claim they can predict the future or quantify risk are dangerous. As in, they can destroy billions of dollars of wealth and potentially take out an entire nation's economy with it. Would the current downturn be as serious if we didn't have mortgage backed securities that had "quantified risk"? When people bought into the notion that these securities were low risk, it endangered the entire world economy. Iceland's bank has gone bankrupt.

      >>They did not adequately consider the risks they were taking.

      They *did* consider the risks they were taking. That's the point - the founders of LTCM had Nobel Laureates on this very subject! Everyone involved in the disaster thought that they had risk tamed by a mathematical model. Then they learned that reality trumps math.

      It's especially bad when you model things using a Gaussian: LTCM used a Gaussian model for price movements. Essentially, by their model, large price movements (like what killed them) were near-impossible. IMO, Gaussians should only be used when you're looking at processes that really are the sum of large numbers of random events (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem). It's grossly inappropriate to use them when it's not. Sure, short-term fluctuations in price might actually be adequately modeled by a Gaussian, but just one real life event throwing a monkeywrench into your system, and all of your little arbitrage gains are wiped out overnight.

  43. Slashdot mods broken--again by cynical+kane · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Who modded this insightful?

    Lenders set the interest rate to be higher than monetary expansion. If they didn't do this, they'd lose real value.

    Money is credit. If the parent was correct, the money supply would be expanding at around a typical debt interest rate (say 5%). Yet there are many stable economies where this has not been the case for a long while--every economy that ever used gold, for instance. Moneylenders didn't conjure gold into existence by setting interest rates.

    The answer is even simpler than that. Amazingly enough, you can pay off debt without increasing the supply in credit. Do Slashdot mods really think you have to magic a dollar bill (or, pre fiat money, a gold coin) out of thin air to pay interest? That interest may not be paid from existing credit or debt? And once it gets paid, the token of exchange disappears forever? Stupid!

  44. Re:Yes, it bloody well is. by EdgeyEdgey · · Score: 2, Informative

    2 dollars are held by the food/energy producer. These are just for bartering. The point of the model was that the final state was the same as the initial state.
    The money in the above economy comes from being able to grow food/produce energy and to be able to do something with it (cook the meal).
    My example was to show that you can create and pay off debt and interest without having to magic more money into existence.
    The graphs could be exponential because production is exponential.
    What you may be alluding to is that the debt the food producer holds could also have been traded, as money. This HAS been magicked into existence and will continue to exist until the debt is paid or defaulted on.

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  45. Re:Yes, it bloody well is. by u38cg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So what? Most money in the world today is fiat currency. It's just a number. It doesn't mean anything intrinsic in itself; it's only value is what people are willing to do or exchange in return for that number. It can exponentialise itself all it likes. As long as I get paid a billion dollars, and my rent, food, utilities and entertainment cost $999m, we're set. Our current problems are down to governments forgetting every lesson they've learnt on macro-economic management since the fall of the gold standard and refusing to slash and burn until capacity is cheap enough to invest in.

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  46. Use the right graph to compare by sjbe · · Score: 2, Informative

    Classical economics cannot explain what is happening right now. It's without precedent. There is a little graph I would like to show [msn.com] you...

    Try looking at that chart in log base 10 format which will provide an apples to apples comparison. The dip in 1929 was MUCH bigger percentage wise than the one we are experiencing presently. Furthermore despite tremendous volatility we basically find ourselves in a decade of more or less flat growth. The DJIA is at roughly the same levels it was 10 years ago. This HAS happened before from the late 1960s to the early 1980s where the stock market remained flat for nearly 20 years.

  47. Re:Taleb's monday morning quarterbacking extends.. by plague3106 · · Score: 2

    The difference is that IT and doctors are based in hard sciences. Economists don't have any facts to base their theories on. They sound nice... but can never be proven.

  48. Re:The government shouldn't take any money by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Informative

    That Swedish formula sounds pretty sensible. In America, a congressmember (can't recall their name at the moment, but a Democrat, perhaps Barney Frank) proposed last month that any bonuses paid bank execs be paid only on a multiyear basis, and paid only in the bank's own stock, tying it to the longterm performance. Which would also require forcing holding the stock for a long time, like until retirement (or maybe 8-10 years, whichever is longer). Perhaps a combination, where the bonuses are paid into a "401k" investing in only the bank itself, for all employees, is the best value/protection for everyone.

    So far, though, America's regulation of that nature is being discussed only for those banks taking the TARP government bailout money. It should be universal. Perhaps the new regulations that Barney Frank is writing now, for probably reintroduction perhaps this Summer, will govern all bank bonuses that way.

    FWIW, the shareholders in these banks should of course be wiped out. They own nothing but epic debt, and ran their corps into the ground (violating "fiduciary responsibility" laws). The government should own these banks now, rehab them with capital and governance, then sell them off (with their shares of the debt they generated) to private owners once the industry is stabilized. And tax the entire banking industry what it cost to get their industry under control.

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    make install -not war