Oh, sure, blame the guy that made you the billions in the first place for not knowing that you were fucking around with the underpinning factors. Real mature, Wall Street. Real mature.
So lets see. A bunch of people bought stock. Stock rises and a bunch of people get rich. Somebody sells stock. A bunch of people get nervous and sell their stock, sending prices plummeting.<p>This story is as old as Wall Street itself. That quants were involved was incidental, thought it makes for some interesting twists.
Regular people overvalue houses, with the encouragement of the government. Banks cash in and some buy into the hype. Who to blame? I know, blame those geeks who crunched some numbers.<p>But whatever you do, don't blame the women who caused this problem in the first place:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubsd-tWYmZw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubsd-tWYmZw</a>
Sure, let's blame the computer scientists, not the dangerous Wall Street culture of getting rich quick with essentially regulated gambling. That'll fix things ;)
I dunno if it's just me or where they not clear as to what they meant by complex systems. Where they talking about just complicated things or more like: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems</a>. I know it's not a really important point of the article but I can see how this type of stuff would make no sense to everyone but people who have knowledge of what complex systems are. Basically I can see how the management of these companies didn't want to interfere with what they didn't understand but seemed to work. But now it's easy to say that stuff was all crap and cause us billions. I hope that some of the science these guys were working on can be salvaged (the good parts at least).
Couldn't we model business cycles and also economic downturns / recessions also? Attempt to quantify bubbles if they possibly exist? Or would that be too computationally hard?