Archive for the ‘Computers Run Amok’ Category

The Rating Agencies: Are They Doomed?

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

The rating agencies have an interesting and distinguished history. I first focused on them when working for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. We needed the permission of Standard and Poors Corporation to use their stock index to price our futures contract when it settled. Looking back at S&P’s decision to go ...

Credit Crisis Silliness: The Carving Knife Didn’t Kill the Butler.

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

One of the more self-destructive and fruitless results of the Credit Crisis is the relentless search for scapegoats. This is silly enough when applied to people. (See my earlier blog, “We’ve Found the 12 People that Caused the Crisis! Now We Can Stop Worrying.”) Of course many, many more than ...

The Banking Crisis Rewrites the Textbooks: How Computers Reregulated the Banking System While We Slept. Part 2

Monday, March 10th, 2008

In the most recent post, we considered the effect of computers on the liability side of bank holding company balance sheets. This post begins to examine the more sweeping and visible effects of computers on the asset side of the balance sheet. During the past decade the profitability of banking was ...

The Banking Crisis Rewrites the Textbooks: How Computers Reregulated the Banking System While We Slept. Part 1

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

In the endless debate between Computo-phobes and Techno-philes I put myself in the category none-of-the-above. What computers do is neutral as I see it – the question is, “What do programmers and their management do with the opportunities computers create?” In the banking business, the effect of computers has been ubiquitous ...