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Abnormal Returns: Wednesday links: momentum effects
The Baseline Scenario: Calvin Trillin’s Theory
EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty: Suits vs. Geeks Watch
Reactions
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the real #theory behind financial markets #crisis? http://bit.ly/MVVIW 10/31/2009 |
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Something I've been thinking about since reading Calvin Trillin's "Wall Street Smarts" a few weeks ago http://bit.ly/MVVIW 10/30/2009 |
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Smart people broke wall street. http://bit.ly/2uJxQi 10/28/2009 |
Wednesday links: momentum effects
Abnormal Returns —
... “The financial system nearly collapsed because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” (NYTimes also ...
Calvin Trillin’s Theory
The Baseline Scenario —
... According to Calvin Trillin (or, more accurately, the probably-at-least-semi-fictional interlocutor he meets at a bar in Midtown), the financial crisis was caused by smart people going to work on Wall Street. In the old days, the story goes, it was the lower third of the class that went to Wall Street, and “by the standards that came later, they weren’t really greedy. They just wanted a nice house in Greenwich and maybe a sailboat. A lot of them were from families that had always been on Wall Street, so they were accustomed to nice houses in Greenwich. They ...
Suits vs. Geeks Watch
EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty —
Calvin Trillin interviews a Wall Street old-timer. When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn't even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn't have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. ...
Write-Offs: 10.14.09
Dealbreaker —
... $$$ "The financial system nearly collapsed," the buzzed man in the bar told me, "because smart guys had started working on Wall Street." [NYT] ...
Links 10/15/09
naked capitalism —
... Bear
EU warns UK’s debt is ‘unsustainable’ Independent
U.S. Foreclosure Filings Jump 23% to Record in Third Quarter Bloomberg versus U.S. foreclosures fall 2nd straight month Reuters. So which version do you want to believe?
Will Goldman Sachs “Do It Again”? Dude, Where’s the Dharma?
Intellectually Bankrupt, Firms Try to Squash Dissent Dean Starkman, Columbia Journalism Review
Wall Street Smarts Calvin Trillin, New York Times. Today’s must read.
Antidote du ...
Smart guys and Wall Street
Paul Krugman —
I’m a little late on this great Calvin Trillin piece , but it accords with my own more specialized memories from grad school. The year I got my PhD (1977), there was a very clear ranking of desirable career paths. The best economics grad students went into academic jobs; the middle went to the Fed or the IMF; the bottom went, poor souls, to Wall Street. Even then this meant an inverse relationship between academic ranking and income, since new assistant professors were paid only around $15,000, equivalent to a bit more than 50K today. But the prestige differences more than ...
Smart guys in history: The Trillin debate
FT Alphaville —
Author Calvin Trillin has really set something off with “Wall Street Smarts”, a brief and whimsical take on the downfall of Wall Street, published earlier this week in the New York Times. In brief, he argues that the smart guys caused the financial crisis, after flooding into Wall Street in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Up to then, the smart guys were drawn to “respectable” professions such as law, academia, or anywhere but finance. And Wall Street was doing just fine, staffed and run by average guys who just wanted a “nice house in Greenwich and maybe a sailboat” — the kind of ...
Wall Street's Fatal Lack of Skepticism
Minyanville —
Last week the New York Times presented a highly satirical and splendidly targeted piece by Calvin Trillin, one of America s greatest writers and the man who brought Arthur Bryant s barbecue restaurant in Kansas City to international attention. In the article, Mr. Trillin argued that Wall Street used to be the province of well-connected dullards; the likable and seemingly harmless athletes from rich families in the back of the room who took gut courses and earned gentlemen s Cs. Only when the smart kids in the classroom made their way to the money world did things start to ...
