Michael at 2Blowhards points us to a New York Observer interview where Tom Wolfe provides an intriguing theory about the current financial mess that may be more accurate than many of us would care to acknowledge:
The whole thing, starting with the subprime, is the fault of the computer. I was just talking to a banker the other day, and not that long ago, 20 years ago, an investment banking house, let’s say, Lehman Brothers, when it got a package of mortgages, they would go through every mortgage, every single one, and they’d throw out the ones that just seemed absurd, they just wouldn’t accept them. Things used to arrive on paper. Today things arrive on a screen, and a screen is back lit, and one of the biggest pains in the neck is trying to read something dully written and complicated on a computer screen. It will drive you nuts—I mean, try it sometime. Now they say, ‘Oh, to hell with it,’ and they just accept the whole package. And if it hadn’t been for that, they’d be going over each loan. What’s happened is the backward march of technology.
2 comments:
Maybe is just computers and we are just too much like sheep to really think.
Well, as the little kids used to say:
"Let not forget about Barney!!"
Unless Congressional Laws and Oversight follow the same theory. And then we gloss over ACORN and thier role in the NINJA debacle.
To error is human, to really foul up takes a computer? The computer made an error? Sounds like a case of plausible denialability and buck passing to me. 'Sure we incentivized these loans, made more of these loans, checked fewer of them, increased our bonuses, and then it all blew up. Who knew? Who could have known?' Who wanted to know?
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