Friday, January 25, 2008

Fascinating ... when you think about it.

Let's see if this really an example of the crowd being wiser than the pundits and theorists, or if the crowd are just followers, blowing around in a gale of random "projections" and catchy government programs.

1 comment:

John Powers said...

Eric Janzen in the most recent Harpers made a really good analogy for this crisis:

"For years, the mantra of the industry was “the solution to pollution is dilution.” Mixing toxins with vast quantities of air and water was supposed to neutralize them. Many decades later, with our plagues of hermaphrodite frogs, poisoned ground water, and mysterious cancers, the mistake in that logic is plain. Modern bankers, however, have carried this mistake into the world of finance. As more and more loans with a high risk of default were made from the late 1990s to the summer of 2007, the shared level of credit risk increased throughout the global financial system."

I don't think "the crowd" really has demonstrated much wisdom about the pollutions problem. But that there is a problem with poison that Janzen points to is widely accepted, and confusions reigns. I don't think "the crowd" will do any better with the economic analog.