Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Hobbesian, Really

Uh, what?

“Good or bad, moral or immoral, people are going to make markets and trade via computers, and this is a natural area of financial engineers,” says Emanuel Derman, a professor at Columbia University and a former Wall Street quant.

Yup, out here in the jungle -- the perfect state of nature that exists south of Canal Street -- people are just inevitably going to execute complex trades relating to obscure financial products with insane amounts of leverage and without any oversight or regulation ...

It's just natural.