The new Diogenes asks: Say, could you please introduce me to a trustworthy member of an elite class? Because I'm having a hard time finding one.
Greenwald has been eviscerating the foreign policy clerisy, and it's all good, clean fun, but O’Hanlon, Pollack, and those guys who put the "arse" in Arsenal aren't the only clerisy out there: It's a target-rich environment.
We've got the members of the famously free press (don't get me started). We've got various flavors--or, possibly, odors--of Beltway consultant. And now this article in WaPo draws our attention to a new one: The financial clerisy:
They are the powerful, cerebral and offstage actors of Wall Street, but the recent turmoil in the financial markets has yanked them into the light.
They are the math geniuses of the quant funds.
nstead of veteran, market-savvy traders waving fistfuls of sell slips, the elite quant funds employ Nobel nerds with math PhDs, often divorced from the real world. It's not for nothing that they are called "black-box" funds -- opaque to outsiders, the boxes contain investment magic understood by only the wizards who conjured it up.
[The quants] work in a form of high math decipherable to a handful of humans on the planet. As such, practitioners of the rare mathematic arts can become the powerful priests of investing, thanks to their strange and obscure language, much the way the medieval church trafficked in Latin, which required the translation of a learned cleric.
Indeed. Always money to be made translating the numinous into language the rubes and marks can understand. (See, e.g., Exodus 20:1-17).
But the 387-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average Aug. 9 and the continuing turmoil in the markets, in part attributed to massive sell-offs by the quant funds, have tarnished some of the quants' glimmering intellectual credentials and shown that, when push comes to shove, they can rush toward the exits as fast as a novice investor.
As elegant as the models are, they cannot predict unpredictable events, or human panic, some traders say. Further, some say, too many quant funds are full of myopic brainiacs, overly reliant on their tools.
Well, shit. It's only people's houses. And lives. But what could go wrong?
Versailles
stank because the courtiers pissed in the corners and on the carpets....
NOTE I'd like to think the answer to Diogenes is doctors and scientists. I mean, the ones who aren't on the take from Big Pharma.
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Leprechaun gold
Methinks anybody who could write a line like "...opaque to outsiders, the boxes contain investment magic understood by only the wizards who conjured it up" is working very hard not to explain this in Harry Potter terms.
We are not told what the other four (besides food) exeptions are to Gamp's Laws of Elemental Transformation, but even Muggle logic suggests that money is probably one of them.
You can assign value to any tangible object, and a great many intangible ones, but you can't go on indefinitely repackaging the value of the same thing and pretending that the packaging itself is valuable. Unlike Horcruxes, any slightest damage to the originating object of value sets up a cascade of increasing damage to the packages based on it.
This will henceforth be called Xan's Corollary to Gamp's Law. The Nobel committee can reach me via corrente mail.
on my knees, with the blood of my firstborn, i beg you xan:
please no more potter jargon. i had to read your post three times to grok the point, having avoided pottermania this far in my life rather completely.
anyhoo, i like the image of the opaque box wrapped inside layers and layers of increasingly shiny packaging. little boys playing the regifting game with each other, pretending like the thing inside is what everybody really wants. when the sucker holding the bag finally opens it and discovers it's really a dead frog that died because no one fed it or let in air, well- i wonder if like little boys, they only feel bad for a minute before moving on to the next thing to break or destroy.
No, we'll get Harry Potter hits from this!
The Hit Slut Speaketh....
I'd turn the handle full on, rather than full off.
We need a post that explains the terms, but twists them our way. We could add them to the glossary..
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
CD hears and obeys: yes, mistress spanksalot*
titter. the things i do for the Cause. ok, Pottymouth away, and let slip the dogs of popular "literature."
* 5 quatloos for the ref.
Python Vs. Potter: This Time It's War!
"Mistress Spanksalot" is, I think, one of the Naughty Nuns who tempts Galahad in "Holy Grail."
See, everybody has their own disappearing step on the staircase, pop-cult-reference wise. I hear there are actually people who have never seen "Blazing Saddles" who would totally not get the joke if I used the line "We'll take the niggers and the chinks, but we don't want the Irish!" for instance.
And OT to ChiDy: I just got around to reading last month's Discover mag and they had an interview with the (now-ex) head of the Iraq National Museum, Donny George (Youkhana). Absolutely heartbreaking.
He stuck it out through the invasion and the aftermath and risked his life every damn day to protect this shit (aka what we used to call "the cultural history of mankind" back when we used to care about such things). He finally gave up...hmm, upon rereading I see it was not a month ago as I originally thought but a year ago.
Anyway, it's probably nothing you didn't already know but might be of help when you're looking to explain stuff to the lesser-informed. Dude does not have a whole lot good to say about Muqtada al-Sadr for starters...
The Black Swan...
...by Nassim Taleb talks a lot about these quants and how they come up with elaborate, graceful, complex investment models that are wonderful and tell the fund managers exactly how to generate money while minimizing risk...right up until something outside the assumptions of the model (but that is usually obvious in hindsight) comes along and wipes out fucking everything. It's a magic box, alright. A complete illusion, in other words.