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What I find most worrying about this report that has surfaced via Slashdot is the leverage of 64 times. I knew about 25 or 30 times leverage, but if this is correct then we are a very long way away from resolution of the problems created by the banks and hedge funds.
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| The Rise of the (Financial) Machines |
| from the come-with-me-if-you-want-a-loan dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 12, @08:32 (The Almighty Bu|
| http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/12/1146231 |
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[0]BartlebyScrivener writes "A New York Times Op-Ed quoting Freeman and George Dyson wonders if Wall Street geeks and 'quants' [1]outsmarted themselves with computer algorithms to create the current financial debacle: 'Somehow the genius quants & the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy; fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and poof! created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers.'" The quoted [2]essay from George Dyson is available at Edge.
Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=08/10/12/1146231
Links:
0. mailto:bscrivener42@gmail.com
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12dooling.html
2. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dysong08.1/dysong08.1_index.html
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| The Rise of the (Financial) Machines |
| from the come-with-me-if-you-want-a-loan dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 12, @08:32 (The Almighty Bu|
| http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/12/1146231 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
[0]BartlebyScrivener writes "A New York Times Op-Ed quoting Freeman and George Dyson wonders if Wall Street geeks and 'quants' [1]outsmarted themselves with computer algorithms to create the current financial debacle: 'Somehow the genius quants & the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy; fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and poof! created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers.'" The quoted [2]essay from George Dyson is available at Edge.
Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=08/10/12/1146231
Links:
0. mailto:bscrivener42@gmail.com
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12dooling.html
2. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dysong08.1/dysong08.1_index.html
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