(c) 2008 Ira Artman
[*click* for Prior] STERLING SLIVERS – Falling Down - [*click* for Theme]
Sources: IMDB & Wikipedia
[1] Casablanca, Captain Renault [Claude Rains], 1942
[2] Falling Down, Foster [Michael Douglas] and Prendergast [Robert Duvall], 1993.
[3] The Dark Knight, The Joker [Heath Ledger], 2008.
Obviously, it didn’t happen precisely in the manner suggested by my “mash-up” of Casablanca, Falling Down, and The Dark Knight. But as the “witch-hunt” continues (see No Place Like Homes) the press consensus seems to be:
“The engineer did it.”
Really?
The New York Times has been hot on this story, of course, following their self-observed success with that Weapons of Mass Destruction thing.
This week, the paper has seen “fit to print” two articles that you should read:
Wall Street’s Extreme Sport, by Steve Lohr
Less Finance May Be Just Fine, by Edward Hadas
Lohr’s piece begins with:
“Today’s economic turmoil, it seems, is an implicit indictment of the arcane field of financial engineering – a blend of mathematics, statistics and computing. Its practitioners devised not only the exotic, mortgage-backed securities that proved so troublesome, but also the mathematical models of risk that suggested these securities were safe.”
“What happened?”
And the Hadas piece concludes with:
“For at least a generation, finance has been taken up as a career by a disproportionately large proportion of the world’s most talented people. If more of the best and the brightest were to take up careers in industry, education or the arts, everyone would be better off.”
Read them both.
[*click* for Theme]
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I used to work with numbers for a living, but now I wash the newspaper ink off my hands each morning as I search for my next job or ‘idea’. Till next time – Ira Artman
REFERENCES
Steve Lohr, The New York Times - Wall Street’s Extreme Sport, 5 Nov 2008.
Edward Hadas, The New York Times – Less Finance May Be Just Fine, 3 Nov 2008.
Manhattan Transfer, The Very Best of The Manhattan Transfer – Twilight Tone/Twilight Zone, Rhapsody, Rhino Atlantic, 1994.
1 response so far ↓
1 Dave Quimby // Nov 11, 2008 at 11:05 pm
NY Times always finds it easier to try to remove the speck from another person’s eye, while ignoring the beam in their own eyes. Their beam is a rigid ideological bias that permeates the entire paper, resulting in declining revenues, readership, and ultimately relevance.
People will gravitate to places where their skills are rewarded and they feel that they have created value. The case could be made that there was too much financial engineering; however, that is more of a managerial failure than anything else. Managers are paid to assess risk, impose limits and controls, and “manage”. Too many of them obviously failed to do so.
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