"He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,’ Eisman says."
Thomas Friedman: All Fall Down, NY Times 25 nov 2008 (min kursivering, JS)

Jag skrev redan för länge sedan "Att låsa sig vid sitt eget sätt att tänka är livsfarligt ... Och det finns en påtaglig risk om ens sätt att tänka har kodats ner i formella modeller och dataprogram, där det blir mycket svårare att urskilja, och därför ifrågasätta." (Se notisen "Think different", Blind Höna 18 okt 2002)

Ett citat till:

"Mr. Davidson said that the idiosyncrasy of the instruments, combined with the overlay of technology, allowed the traders to live in denial. They would sit at terminals and use data — historical data that had been gathered before they started giving out money to people with no ability to pay — and decide that the risks were manageable. All of it was unreal, ineffable, tough to know."
David Carr: Daring to Say Loans Made No Sense, NY Times 28 sep 2008

Och ytterligare ett:

As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge.

It was easy enough for us humans to understand a stick or a dollar bill when it was backed by something tangible somewhere, but only computers can understand and derive a correlation structure from observed collateralized debt obligation tranche spreads. Which leads us to the next question: Just how much of the world’s financial stability now lies in the “hands” of computerized trading algorithms?
Richard Dooling: The Rise of the Machines, NY Times 11 okt 2008

Permalänk | Andra som länkat hit (0)