Blaming Quants for what happened on Wall Street is like charging Enzo Ferrari with murder, every time someone drives one of his cars off a cliff. Senators and Congressmen demanded that banks do profoundly stupid things. In an effort to keep them happy the heads of the banks turned to the quants to find a way to make this possible. The fact that they did as they were asked shouldn't be an indictment.
Think of it another way. Congress writes a regulation repealing the law of gravity. Engineers respond by building an airplane, hot air balloons, and dirigibles. These things come with major caveats when it comes to gravity, but most people don't listen and don't care. Instead the NYTimes writes a series of stories praising the (no doubt Democrat) Congressmen who had the foresight and vision to free us from this pernicious downward pulling force.
The engineers stand there saying "Yes but..." as people sell their homes and move permanently into blimps to live among the clouds. No one listens to the engineers because those details are just getting in the way of the 'new normal'. they are preventing people form enjoying the 'new age of man' as an avian creature. And when the inevitable begins and the dirigibles begin to fall, the very first thing the congressmen do is have every engineer in the country arrested for failing to obey the law against gravity.
PJ Orourke seems to be the latest 'man of the right' to forget this. Okay... maybe he's not really a man of the right... maybe he's just a man from the bar stool to the right.. but still. It's not the intelligent that are at fault here Peej, it's the insecure. That condescension that you so dislike from Obama doesn't happen because he's smart, it happens because he needs you to think he is.
The difference between someone who is really smart and someone who just pretends to be on TV is that the person who is really smart can admit how little he actually knows, while the faker can't admit not knowing anything. It's that insecurity that makes them natural Democrats. The self congratulation that defines leftist policy is too sweet a nectar for the insecure to say no to.
All those derivatives came with caveats and we told you all of them. No one who understood them ever thought they eliminated risks. But no one in power cared because they brought us all one step closer to the great socialist dream where everyone will have everything they want whether they've earned it or not.
They thought that ignoring reality was in their self interest. And since the only people who have come out of this whole thing as big winners are congressmen and the other people in government, maybe they were right after all.
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