#12 poster:

12. March 3, 2009
1:43 pm
Link
Dr. Krugman,

I’m too old (53?) to dive deeply into the wonkish aspects of some of your posts - though a lifelong exposure to applied physics and numerical modeling makes much of it conceptually accessible…

I’m asking here because this morning I read this WIRED article…

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street
By Felix Salmon 02.23.09
http://www.wired.com...ne/17-03/wp_quant

… and what I found particularly remarkable can be summarized in three questions:

(1) Do you agree that one misused computational model is the rotten core of this crisis?

… How did it happen? (and insights beyond Salmon’s incisive storytelling is welcome…)

(2) How would you apportion responsibility for that misuse?

… from MIT postgrads “playing games” to the Indifferent Insiders laying the risk-less bets?

(3) How would you avoid this happening again?

… Should the idea of ‘intellectual property’ and ‘proprietary methods’ be questioned?

— batondor

How cute that the fuzzy-math / arsenic-doped catalyst for innate-greed behind these idiotic 'financial instruments' should come to be called, a Gaussian copula function !!. Copulated corporations?

But none of the owl-entrails cast by these Nobeleous wannabe-astrologers cared to extrapolate a tiny bit and see Fucked Countries and the {soon?} unravelling of the entire planetary Ponzi scheme: after its first Real-Test.

Economic 'Science' my ass; from the slick MIT grads with no slightest comprehension of the human effects of their invented-scam -- right on through all the layers of insouciant banking Suits -- this entire card trick was a psychology exercise: in a premeditated way, from the first, they wrapped an enigma in a conundrum and obfuscated the outer-wrapper with the usual BS TLAs (did 'velocity of money' come up?)

And not a single link in this chain of obscurant jargon had the guts to say, WAIT.. just a damn minute! (well, likely there Were a few killjoys / unheeded as normally.) And by the time politicians were inescapably involved -- on went the pretense that this econobabble actually 'meant something in Econ Science' cha cha cha. And a Pol would feel great pressure to nod solemnly to these meaningless 'theoretical explanations'. Don't want to seem Econ-iggerant, right?

And if THAT is where we still are? -- it would appear that all that's arrayed against that Lost Decade thing is: the perspicuity of Obama + his brain trust. (And even with their full-ken.. nobody yet has advanced an algorithm for undoing the faux-'trades' and for handling the zombie banks (whether liquidated or next run by new and newly-ept technicians.))

"How corrupt Is Murica, anyway?"

-- How high can you count?



And as to whether any of these perps, along with that crowd of the previous 8 years -- ever see the reclamation of their loot? Haven't heard a peep.

(Terry Gross today interviewed a Prof. from the MIT Sloan School of Business (wtf is MIT doing teaching 21st century astrology?) He had some interesting nay Practical answers - aka axe the zombies as with the S&L RFC nostrum for handling the detritus/fallout from that (Reconstruction Finance Corp.) Seemed to think that much of the brouhaha could be addressed as: not even all that abnormal. But what does he know: MIT used to be about science sorts of things.

Can bizness-lying rise to the level of treason, if enough of a country is destroyed by the consequences?
Guillotine operators everywhere are ... standing by.