
Shocking Fraud from Financial Scum - wglb
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2010/04/shocking_fraud_from_financial.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+scienceblogs%2FCyKN+%28Good+Math%2C+Bad+Math%29
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Rod
Mark Chu-Carroll, the self-important math blogger, keeps on writing on stuff
he clearly has no clue about. Nothing has changed. Bankers are "evil". Bankers
are "greedy". Yada yada yada. A lot of name-calling, but no content. Nothing
to be learned here. Go to the campus library and read a book on structured
finance instead. You'll learn more.

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prodigal_erik
I see dozens of paragraphs with clear explanations of not only what they did
but why it was profitable. If any of these are incorrect I suggest you point
out how, because "no content" is obviously not true.

~~~
Rod
If Chu-Carroll displayed some humility, I'd cut him some slack. He has become
increasingly arrogant over the years.

Financial contracts _per se_ are amoral. Chu-Carroll claims that a _naked CDS_
is immoral, which is ridiculous. He shows that he does not understand how the
financial world works, he passes moral judgements left and right when he
should stick to the facts. The "content" of his blog post is equivalent to the
content you'd get if you read the Wikipedia entries on various structured
products.

In the end, my problem is not with Chu-Carroll himself, but rather with this
dangerous meme that something as complex as structured finance can be
summarized in a few blog posts. This "illusion of knowledge" can be more
damaging than plain ignorance. I know people who have worked in Finance for
years and still don't understand entirely how banking works. It takes years to
understand these things in detail.

For more instructive content, I'd suggest this book:

<http://books.google.com/books?id=r4gGl33zE0EC>

