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Paul Wilmott Wants To Retrain and Reform Wall Street's Quants
theodp writes "What if an aeronautics engineer couldn't reconcile his elegant design for a state-of-the-art jumbo jet with Newton's second law of motion and decided to tweak the equation to fit his design? In a way, Newsweek reports, this is what's happened in quantitative finance, which is in desperate need of reform. And 49-year-old Oxford-trained mathematician Paul Wilmott — arguably the most influential quant today — thinks he knows where to start. With his CQF program, Wilmott is out to save the quants from themselves and the rest of us from their future destruction. 'We need to get back to testing models rather than revering them,' says Wilmott. 'That's hard work, but this idea that there are these great principles governing finance and that correlations can just be plucked out of the air is totally false.'"
Even if it had worked tactically, it was a strategic disaster. There's no way that the war in Iraq could have been a good thing for the country. OTOH, some people are getting rich, so it's been a good thing for them.
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If treason weren't quite so narrowly defined by the constitution, then Bush would have knowingly committed treason. He knowingly acted in a way calculated to disadvantage the country. I'll grant that probably wasn't his purpose, but he had to know that that was one of the effects he was going to get. Even after WWII we had to maintain a LONG occupation. Well, that one was necessary...or at least it seems so from what I know. But it was VERY expensive, and not only in time and money, but also in terms of damage to the US social structures. There's no way that Iraq was worth that. Eventually we're going to be forced to withdraw, and just about everyone outside the US knows that. Certainly everyone with any political clout in Iraq. Until we do it's going to be a running sore, and there's no way a better outcome could have been expected. Things haven't gone as poorly as I expected, in fact, I'm rather heartened that it hasn't been worse (unless the news that I read is more censored than I know). But we don't have ANY real local support. Not everyone is opposed to us, and some are even pleased. But nobody is going to support us when they know that our stay is temporary. And they shouldn't.
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Additionally, we haven't been acting in a way calculated to endear us to the local population. We've been quite high handed and brutal. Also capriciously violent and unpredictable. So even those who would like to be our friends don't trust us not to turn on them. This may make us slightly preferable to those they know would turn on them, but that's quite faint as praise goes.
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Compare this to the way that we occupied either Germany or Japan. Well, the situations were different. In both those cases the countries had clearly initiated the violence, so everyone saw at least a modicum of justice in their being occupied afterwards. And the occupying troops didn't go out of their way to be unpleasant to people. (They weren't nearly as nice as the propaganda says they were, of course.) This is closer to the way that Hitler occupied France or Poland. (Sorry, that's the closest example that I know much about.) Nobody saw that as being just, so *of course* there were resistance fighters. Just as there are in Iraq. I'm not claiming that our troops act like the storm-troopers did, but at times it's much too close for any comfort at all.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No mod points at the moment, but this is +10 insightful.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!