Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbart | Hacker News Reader

"The mastermind of the LIBOR scandal was a guy named Tom Hayes, a mildly autistic mathematician"

How convenient is to have such people around /s. Developers should learn from stories like this as well -- don't do anything illegal, even though your superiors tell you so, because when shit hits the fan, you will be the one held accountable.

View on HN

It's unfortunately a much more convenient narrative than blaming the people that actually benefitted the most (i.e., bank CEOs).

"This is part of the reason I love Hayes as a central character for this book — because he’s not your cookie-cutter banker out of central casting. This is a guy who is much happier going home after a day of work and having a bucket of fried chicken and an orange juice and watching Seinfeld reruns than he is going out to Michelin-starred restaurants or a swanky club. To me, his massive social awkwardness — the fact that he would go to a dinner party, and sit next to a stranger, and start talking to her very loudly about his dandruff problem — he had no idea how to behave in normal society."

Political and cultural ostracism has real world consequences. They've found their scapegoat and they're piling on. It's pretty disgusting actually.

I partly blame media for that as well, because they tend to portray movie-like evil minded geniuses that are probably more appealing and easier to grasp for general reader than methodical, faceless, industrious scams and legal gray areas. This can be seen even more so in politics.

Captain America punches Campaign Finance in the face, freeing the American people from the grip of expanding monopolies and anti-consumer practices!

The media ain't what caps on RMS in every HN thread in which he is mentioned.

> Political and cultural ostracism has real world consequences. They've found their scapegoat and they're piling on. It's pretty disgusting actually.

Why are you so sure he isn't responsible? Is it impossible for a mildly autistic mathematician that likes fried chicken and is socially awkward to have committed any crimes?

Not sure why you've decided to pick at this point, even the article itself says multiple times that he's far from innocent in all this, but it also seems obvious that he was not the lone-wolf mastermind of an enormous financial scandal spanning many countries and multi-billion dollar companies. It's possible to look at the narrative around a certain character in a story and intuit that something doesn't make a ton of sense, like in this case, why would someone who's doing well in life and enjoys the simple things, risk everything for gains they don't even care much about?

I honestly find these two statements hard to reconcile:

Enrich: I do want to make clear that [Hayes] is not an innocent victim here. He is someone who was participating, and he was not acting properly. He was acting illegally, and I think deserves to be punished. I just find it galling that he is alone in being punished.

Also Enrich: This is part of the reason I love Hayes as a central character for this book — because he’s not your cookie-cutter banker out of central casting. This is a guy who is much happier going home after a day of work and having a bucket of fried chicken and an orange juice and watching Seinfeld reruns than he is going out to Michelin-starred restaurants or a swanky club. To me, his massive social awkwardness — the fact that he would go to a dinner party, and sit next to a stranger, and start talking to her very loudly about his dandruff problem — he had no idea how to behave in normal society.

That makes him slightly endearing as a character, I think, but it also kind of helped explain how he stumbled into this. He was just completely unable to pick up on any subtle cues or social boundaries that normally would help moderate someone’s behavior.

So he deserves punishment for doing something bad when he is inherently dependent on others to help him separate the right thing from wrong?

They escape goated this guy. They had an excel file they had a wide range of people fill in their values that went into the LIBOR number. Tom Hayes sent things over email which helped them scape goat him. When Tom Hayes was hired, they trained him how to do this LIBOR rigging process. He did bad things also but he was just a part of a system

Traders, unlike engineers, are paid commensurate with their performance and worth to their employer. He had plenty of freedom in choosing his trades and LIBOR manipulation was to his direct personal financial benefit. Hardly a scapegoat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com