Clearly in my Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination I underestimated the ability of pathological behavior to claim rewards for itself, as Felix Salmon explains in his piece on Jon Corzine:
Corzine demonstrated virtually all of the pathologies of the rogue trader....
Lots of financial firms make big bets and blow up. But what we saw at MF Global was much more than that. In fact, as Corzine detailed at great length in his prepared testimony last week, his big sovereign-debt bet didn’t actually lose money at all. But MF Global died all the same, because the bet was so large and risky that it caused a fatal cascade of downgrades and margin calls….
A CEO wants to be paranoid about all risks; a rogue trader wants to hide them. It’s clear which one Corzine was.
The piece goes through the four major properties of rogue traders, and how Corzine fits them (though perhaps the systemic or cultural problem with the model is that nearly everyone on Wall Street demonstrates at least a couple of them to some degree.)
Recent Comments