"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Sunday, December 07, 2008

File under Duh

Catching up on some prior items that should have been blogged earlier 
Like this one from Nov 4th.

But the piece misses some other, to me obvious factors.
How do you quantify, or model, greed and panic?

In Modeling Risk, the Human Factor Was Left Out - NYTimes.com

"What happened?

The models, according to finance experts and economists, did fail to keep pace with the explosive growth in complex securities, the resulting intricate web of risk and the dimensions of the danger.

But the larger failure, they say, was human — in how the risk models were applied, understood and managed. Some respected quantitative finance analysts, or quants, as financial engineers are known, had begun pointing to warning signs years ago. But while markets were booming, the incentives on Wall Street were to keep chasing profits by trading more and more sophisticated securities, piling on more debt and making larger and larger bets."

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