I strongly believe that, once again, the culprit was not the lack of regulation, nor the "complexity" of risk. The job of financial institutions is to collect, price, disaggregate, de-correlate, re-aggregate, and price risk. To blame complexity is to seek a barter economy. The culprits are bad incentive systems and poor risk management at several major banks.
What is regulation but an "incentive system"?
the culprit was not the lack of regulation, (...) the world has something to learn from Chinese leadership in terms of their steady hand on the tiller.
(...)
the world has something to learn from Chinese leadership in terms of their steady hand on the tiller.
What is regulation but a "hand on the tiller"?
Why do we even pretend to listen to these wankers???? In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Now, are we aware of our own ulterior motives? A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Spelling out one's own hidden biases is a bit harder :-) A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
So, our bias may be correlated to the bias in the general media. If the main winds were to change, we may change in the opposite direction. Or maybe not, we can't know because it hasn't happened. Yet I remember your warning that we should not try to find confirmation of what we were saying in each and every item of the current crisis -confirmation bias.
I tend to see ET as having different standards for some countries (Russia and China come to mind) -being ready to defend things that would be slammed in many other ones. That's an example of appearing to overshoot in opposing the mainstream bias. Similarly, and I say that as an ardent supporter of wind power, I have the impression that some graphs are explained with enthusiasm trumping a purely neutral analysis -again, the barrage of bad faith from the mainstream may explain some of that.
As for myself, I know that the French right has been so awful for so long that I have to fight deep scepticism if something they say seems to make sense. I'm always looking for the catch (there very often is one. Is there always one? Maybe not). "The womb that spawned that thing is fertile yet"
Well, I personally wouldn't call him a wanker. But I think we need to listen to people like him if only because they have enormous influence, and if we disagree with them, then we need to provide arguments that are persuasive to people who are uninformed or undecided.
Your two points --
-- are examples of such argumentation that will help in convincing people that the "de-regulation was not the problem" meme is wrong. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
And they bug me also when they pick all the contracts thanks to their absolute absence of shame in talking complete bullshit. Then they leave with nothing done and we have to pick up the pieces and actually do the work, except there is only 20% of the budget left.
For instance, I'm working on some improvement projects that used to be the tiny brother to a major program. Well, now it's part of the major program, and in fact pretty much ALL of the major program. Said major program included it because, well, it had not delivered anything and needed to actually show some results, which is what we were getting.
Now, prior to that, the major program (I can't tell you which consulting company did it of course, but you just know it was 'strategic consulting' of course) had communicated quite a lot on what they had done. Guess what was the main metric in their communication?
The length of the process maps they had produced (we're talking post-its on flipcharts there). They were bragging about how many meters they had. [Cyrille's Jawdrop™ Technology] there. Of course they got a lot (A LOT) more money than we'll get for actually finding the problems and fixing the main ones. Oh, and in passing, their process maps were unusable and we has to redo the ones we needed. Silly us, we failed to measure them and use that as proof of our action.
That was my rant for the day. Mmm, maybe that's why Mig thought I was a lot older than I actually was.
(and I can just picture a ((*rant Cyrille)) popping up next now, silly me) "The womb that spawned that thing is fertile yet"
