Small firewalls that contained corrections were being dismantled, leading to larger, far more damaging crashes. Part of this was the result of greater connections from travel and communications, but a great part is the result of central powers believing they can control macro markets when they cannot. There is just too much dispersed and unarticulated knowledge for anyone or any administrative bureaucracy to accomplish this.
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Firewalls serve to restrain complex and tightly coupled systems; small recessions are preferable to systemic failures. The political wish to avoid recessions by neutering small corrections only paves the way for greater failures.
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I find books like Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation to be refreshing and valuable not because they are right or wrong but because they offer a different perspective that what we are commonly fed. Much of our policy from both
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Despite this constant free flow of information … we are caught unaware as one crisis after another devastates the financial markets. The temptation is to think that information and openness will enable us to risk and eliminate market crisis. As
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As a result of the depressed economy the difference in income between whites and minorities have widened. While the most shrill will find this to be clear testament to the inherent racism in the GOP, the reality is that both
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Accounting has failed us as investors and managers. Accounting should be about generating sufficient statistics to assess the state of a firm. It is more than simply taking numbers and putting them in the appropriate bin based on generally accepted
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The implications of complexity in financial markets are more pointed than for most other industries: In the financial markets, some participants have a self- interest in gaming the system. Traders do not act as uninvolved parties. They are ready to
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The natural reaction to market breakdown is to add layers of protection and regulation. But trying to regulate a market entangled by complexity can lead to unintended consequences, compounding crisis rather than extinguishing them because the safeguards add even more
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