Slashdot Mirror
World Cup Prediction Failures
pdcull writes "We all read on Slashdot about the investment banks using their massive computer power and clever modeling techniques to predict the FIFA World Cup outcome. Now that Goldman Sachs's, UBS's and Danske Bank's favorite, Brazil, has been eliminated, and with JP Morgan's England long gone, the question that begs to be asked is: can we really trust these guys to predict the financial markets any better than they did World Cup?"
I thought the point of the stock market was that people with money can buy shares into companies they think will be profitable. i pitty these idiots who try all their best to get as rich as possible as fast as possible. and I pitty the rest of the world, who see clearly that these guys treat everything like a lottery, and still trust them.
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"No" is not the answer, Paul is. He correctly predicted the outcome of all of Germany's games so far, whichi is pretty impressive, considering Germany's loss to Serbia.
Of course, Paul is an octopus who picks the winning side by choosing the box with the winning side's flag on it.
(Also, very few of the banks were actually "bailed out." Most were provided with a government-backed high-interest loan that they had to pay back, which many already have)
And not all of the banks wanted the loans but the government pushed it on more banks than were necessary so that the consumers would not know which banks were in need of a "bail-out." The government was worried that if we knew which banks were in need of help, we would all leave those badly run banks in favor of the banks that handled our money responsibly.
In Texas, that is actually a selling point in a number of local bank commercials "And you can rest assured that we did not accepted any government bail out money. Our customer's investments were always secure."
My best friend in college came from a family of bankers. They own 2 banks. The bigger of the two is still family run, but he owns more of the smaller bank, which is more of a rural community bank. Well apparently, both banks were called by the local fed branch and told to take Tarp money. The bigger bank did. The smaller bank said, "No thank you, we didn't make bad loans." Well the smaller bank has been dragged through the mud with 5 separate investigations in the last 18 months by the government. They'll hold local press conferences saying, "This bank is under investigation for violation of the Equal housing laws, or this or that". Each time, the investigations have come up empty or they've been cleared of wrong doing. But is there any press conferences about that from the feds? Nope. They didn't do anything wrong other than refuse to take the government's money and ran their bank wisely.
Apparently, if you didn't need Tarp money, the government look at your bank as though you MUST have been doing something "wrong".
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.