Are Scientists to Blame for the Financial Crisis?

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When the fed is spending $7.4 trillion to clean up the wreckage, you know someone’s gotta take the blame. So who should shoulder it? Scientific American thinks at least some of the fault belongs with the physics and math whizzes who built the risk models that dug our grave.

In a byline-free editorial, the magazine traces our woes back to a 2004 meeting in which the SEC agreed to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves “needed for a rainy day.” This move provided the requisite billions that banks pumped into mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. And who created the structures for these impossibly complex schemes that caused the mass bank implosion? Wall Street’s band of “lapsed physicists and mathematical virtuosos,” also known as “quants,” who “both invented these oblique securities and created software models that supposedly measured the risk a firm would incur by holding them in its portfolio.”

Given that hindsight is 20-20, we now realize that all these models are really only accurate for a limited period of time, at a very narrow confidence level—meaning that whenever those conditions aren’t fantasy-scenario optimal, the actual risk can be enough to incite a global meltdown. Good to know!

So should we be tarring and feathering the brains who built the beam we used to hang ourselves? It’s hardly that simple, a fact that Sci Am acknowledges while still laying on the heavy guilt:

The causes of this fiasco are multifold—the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy played a big role—but the rocket scientists and geeks also bear their share of the blame. After the crash, the quants and traders they serve need to accept the necessity for a total makeover…

For its part, the quant community needs to undertake a search for better models—perhaps seeking help from behavioral economics, which studies irrationality of investors’ decision making, and from virtual market tools that use “intelligent agents” to mimic more faithfully the ups and downs of the activities of buyers and sellers.

In other words, maybe we should start calculating risk using models that take into account actual human behavior, as opposed to some nebulous dreamland where markets don’t freeze solid and eras don’t go down in a haze of napalm.

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November 24th, 2008 Tags: , ,
by Melissa Lafsky in Science Goes to Washington | 93 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

93 Responses to “Are Scientists to Blame for the Financial Crisis?”

  1. 1.   Ian O'Neill Says:

    Or perhaps use physicists and mathematicians in Wall St… I’m pretty sure this whole mess may have been avoided (if not predicted years in advance) if the guys who wrote the models were using them on the ground…

    After all, a car is only as good as its driver–it could be the most advanced risk model in the world, but if the results from the model are interpreted by a non-specialist, the model is only as good as the user.

    I’m surprised SciAm would take this stance to be honest.

    Thanks for the insight!

    Cheers, Ian

  2. 2.   Amos Kenigsberg Says:

    Interesting idea, Ian, but I think that it was (and is) generally the quants themselves who write and use their own models.

    Technology Review was a little ahead of the game when they pointed out the quants’ systematic error in a piece at the end of last year — good stuff.

  3. 3.   Not Science, Greed « Simple Country Physicist Says:

    [...] , Simple Country Physics , Southern Fried Cynicism I notice in Discovery an article [Link] laying partial blame for the Wall Street debacle to the “quants”, people educated as [...]

  4. 4.   nickgogerty Says:

    Myron Scholes has blown up 2 hedge funds personally and the Mean Variance assumption baked into most risk models is doing a heck of a job on the rest of the financial infrastructure. It is a paradigm problem Markets are a social paradigm not a physical one. There is no falsifiability in risk and yet we use models that impute it. The only thing worse than no risk tools is relying on flawed risk tools. http://nickgogerty.typepad.com/designing_better_futures/2008/11/value-risk-and-frogger.html

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