Financial crisis been blamed on people with Asperger's! (wtf

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I hope that Taleb guy doesn't plan on coming to Canada...he could face criminal prosecution for incitement of hatred against a minority group.Just replace the words people with aspergers with the word Jew, and you will think you are reading Nazi propaganda from the 1930's

Criminal Code of Canada-incitement of hatred

(Theres another thread on this already which could be merged.)
Anyway Taleb should be forced to name names. Put up or shut up.
Its like someone neeeded another chapter to justify a second edition.
Hey everybody, "My book has Aspergers too."

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there is always going to be somebody cleverer and more intelligent than oneself. if a finance guy was a very sharp, slick talker who fooled you into believing you could swing a house that you really couldn't afford [but this fact was concealed by inpenetrable contract-speak mumbo-jumbo], and then you lost your job and found yourself unable to make the [surprise!] balloon payments and out on the street, would you blame yourself?

it is bad karma to use one's superior intelligence to hurt other less-intelligent folk. these folk [mortgage defaulters] cannot be said to have truly known what they were getting into, as no sensible person deliberately jumps upon the skids towards bankrupcy. the moneylenders took advantage of the borrowers' naivete and exaggerated view of their own intelligence, just to make a buck. this is victimization, and to blame the mortgage defaulters is simple scapegoating.

it is also bad karma to blame the victim, to afflict the afflicted [the mortgage defaulters] while comforting the comfortable [moneylenders and wall street]. what goes 'round, comes 'round. point the finger at who you will, but there is more than enough blame to go around [predatory lenders, financially illiterate folk, arcane financial regs, hubris among the financial bigwigs and everybody else].
can't we all just be a little nicer to each other, more understanding of one another? it's really not that hard.

To be fair, a lot of people don't have the savvy to realize that the loan officer IS NOT looking out for them. Lots of loans were made that any honest loan officer would never have encouraged a borrower to sign.

We live in a society largely undereducated on how debt obligations work. As long as it looks like they can manage the payments and they are encouraged that it's a good thing, people fall for it on a regular basis.

Well, on the up side, the crashes are predictable, given that they seem to happen once every 20 years (10 years of financial booming followed by 10 years financial recession). The last recession happened in 1990 (when it was at the lowest) . . . its 2010 and at the lowest again. Here's how i figure it: You have these businessmen running the nation (yes, politicians included since they have their hands in something to complement their federal pay). When things are good, democrats are in office (8 years or so) and there is a financial boom (followed by them using their position to get themselves out of some sort of legal issue). So, we pay for that legality, then republicans get voted in . . . and somehow, a war starts (about the time the economy starts to drop). This war starts for two reasons: 1) Economics are in decline, 2) In order to avert another civil war (likely between working class and upper class), a war is started with another nation to divert attentions. 20 years ago, it was Hussein . . . now its Laden (well, over the course of 20 years). If you look at the trends in wars and economy, i think you will find this pattern quite prevalent. Assuming that 2010 is the lowest point in the economic standing, Id be willing to be that we will be in a war/recession again probably by the year 2021 (so 2030 will be the next economic low). Going back in time: 1970 - Vietnam, 1950 - Korea, 1930 (well 39) - WWII, 1910 (within that decade) - WWI, 1890s - Spanish/American, 1860s (30 year period difference) - Civil War . . . given this trend, I wonder what the state of the American economy was prior to the 1900s. So, moral of the story, save money like crazy starting at the end of every war because someone (or some group, seeing as how i heard that this economic crisis was caused by people being a bit too optimistic about oil) is going to screw up the economy and this is the likely trend.

Interesting this came out... I'm not too surprised though. Some guy (I think rep of Missouri, here) actually is trying to pass this bill/law of some sort (sorry, I'm not into politics so don't know the correct terminology too well) to get ABA therapy approved by insurance.

The problem with that is, the way he's trying to get it to pass, is by telling people that ABA has been known to "help and even CURE autism".

Looks like a reasonable map, though I'm not sure about the evidence for wars being deliberately started for those conscious purposes. Which isn't to say I'd put it past them.

Marx noticed the boom-and-bust thing (now accepted by economists from both wings as a normal part of the business cycle). But at the time of his writing it, the peaks were roughly 10 years apart. Interesting that the cycle seems to have extended (unless you're only plotting the biggest crashes)....but what's always mystified me is the reason that it happens. You seem to see the cause as people screwing up, but I often wonder whether there's a more technical answer, to do with time delays and discrepancies in the economic system itself. Marx might describe it somewhere in Capital, but I don't do very well fathoming his writing style.

I expect some economists are quite sincere about wishing to solve the boom & bust problem, but it's interesting that the combined might of the lot of them hasn't stopped it happening yet. I think the general faith used to be that there wouldn't be a recession as long as growth was kept down to a few percent. So we went through the misery of that, yet still the system crashed.

Well, everything seems to be determined by rate of advancement, meaning that a system that runs strong and hard continuously will fail that much sooner whereas a system that goes at a steady pace and achieves its "goal" after a longer period of time wont crash as much and the lows will have a minimal impact . . . lemme see if i can make this visual:
.........................................------------ (economic peak/boom)
......................................../................\
......................................./...................\
...................................../.......................\
..................................../..........................\
our system: begin...../.............................\(10 years)
...................................................................\......................./ (end of 20 years)
....................................................................\...................../
.....................................................................\.................../
......................................................................\................./
.......................................................................\.............../
........................................................................----------- (economic recession/depression)

In the longer period system, the steepness of the wave is shorter, but has a longer wavelength (ie timeframe, 50-100 years). But, the problem with this would be that those who know what to do in a crisis have retired/passed on and the new people may/may not know how to hand the smaller crisis. I guess it can be said that using a monetary system of any sort is a double-edged sword.

I suppose the use of money as symbolic labour has to be a pre-condition for the said crises. Society comes to see money as absolutely real, and suddenly its economic problems are not about resources any more, but about the symbols that we allow to represent those resources. It's strange - recessions are pretty much accepted as normal, yet how did it come to this, when production ceases not because of a reduced need for its products or any lack of producing power, but simply because of the locations of some bits of paper.

Yet economic systems other than capitalism can use money and still be relatively stable - there was the old feudal system, and of course communism which has a command economy rather than a free market. Perhaps the way the paper goes round in those systems avoids the complicated add-ons that the free market keeps obfuscating itself with?

I really like this quote:

People with Asperger's Syndrome are largely immune to social pressures; they often do not recognize them, or if they do, dismiss them as silly.

That has been my experience in life, that alot of what my peers were doing just didn't interest me and I didn't have to participate. It also explains why the crisis they are talking about was caused by NT's, because aspies are less likely to go out and buy a house they can't afford just to keep up with their peers, which is apparently what caused the 'crisis' they are addressing. It's a bit like blaming drug addiction on pushers, or I should say in this context, it's about like blaming the entire drug crisis on one particular dope dealer standing on the corner of Main Street somewhere in Illinois. Not the social conditions that created the need for people to numb their feelings, or the people that bought and ingested these drugs, just this one dealer punk, lets call him Ralph. It's all his fault, the bastid.

'The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It,' by Scott Patterson

http://seekingalpha.com/article/188342- ... -patterson

I have yet to read anything about these Quants explicitly encouraging such reckless investment decisions in the past.. like giving people mortgages who probably can't pay them back in the future.

Unfortunately, their financial models cannot account for the true risk of mortgage backed securities when they've been *told* these securities are risk-free when in fact they are not.

They receive the blame because they're an easy target..

...you've got to be kidding. Jesus Christ I hope this guy dies before I get my hands on him.

If anyone is to blame, it's the government. All these bailouts to major companies are simply short fixes, and they definitely won't help our national debt. Also, corporations outsourcing all of our labor to foreign lands means less jobs at home, and given how many people are unemployed at the moment, it's the stupidest of stupid ideas to go overseas.

And as for this dumbass author, if he seriously believes this BS he's written, then I invite him to go and find an economic solution on his own, since he obviously doesn't need our help. He's just going to end up pushing us further into financial collapse because of his own goddamn pride.

I guess this time around it wasn't politically fashionable to blame Jews. They had to have someone as a scapegoat. Heaven forbid that anyting actually be caused by normal people making stupid, selfish decisions en masse. The implications would just be too awful to talk about.

It sounds like most of you guys didn't even read the article.

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gee, for a supposedly "less emotional" lot, there is a lot of emotion being vented here on this forum by lots of folk. the all-too-human need to scapegoat is all too apparent here. nobody understands that there is more than enough blame to go 'round under the sun.