Passing the Collateralized Debt Obligation (formerly, the buck)
Like many of you fine folks I've been trying to get my mind around the collapse of the world financial markets since last August. To that end I've been doing a lot of reading, radio listening, and have subscribed to a variety of podcasts to try and figure things out. It was during a piece on NPR that I heard a financial analyst talk about the root causes of the crisis being due to the complexity of the financial "instruments" being utilized. By way of exculpation, though, the analyst said something along the lines of, "the problem was that these instruments were created by 'rocket scientists' and people didn't really understand how they worked - so you had these physics PhD's coming up with instruments that were far too risky and eventually brought the market down."
You see what happened there?
The financial meltdown is not caused by greedy investment bankers, or the cupidity of executives - no, it's those nerds again. The same people who were to scapegoated for everything from Enron to nuclear arsenals are called back into play. See, folks, it's not the people who decide to deploy weapons/strategies/financial instruments without bothering to understand even remotely how they work - it's those eggheads who tinker with things and force their ideas on the decision makers. How cleverly they deflect blame from themselves and onto their subordinates.
These folks are adept at dodging blame for their bad decisions and now it seems like they will also escape the inevitable market-driven consequences for their string of apparently willfully uninformed decisions. I wish I could say I was surprised but as I've remarked in the past these guardians of accountability have no need for any accountability themselves.
This whole affair seems to be yet another front in the popular war on reason in the United States. From politics to business, there's an undeniable hostility towards intellectuals of various stripes. This anti-intellectual strain in American society is both pernicious and widespread, materializing whenever a complex problem arises. It makes me ashamed thazt my adopted countrymen should be so shallow, and proudly lowbrow.