Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge. Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."
I made no positive claims, only negative ones.
>Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."
Doing my best to refrain from username-dropping here. If an iterated game rewards some strategy s, then the eventual adoption of strategy s is inevitable. Don't hate the player.
>Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge.
I will assume you're referring to Chris Bart and Gregory McQueen here. ;)
But seriously, human beings, lacking omniscience, require strategies to work around their blind spots and keep moving forward. When/if we're lucky enough to be cognizant of our own ignorance, we can either notify the others in the room or we can not - both are real options; neither strategy is universally dominant. Obviously, I'm being nice; it is called 'bullshitting'. But if you have a nose for it, then who's to blame for letting it affect you?
When the players are also the people that spent considerable effort getting the rules of the game rewritten in a way that end up causing it to reward the strategy (replacing rules that had been put into place precisely to prevent the kind of collapse that happened after the rule change, after another instance of the same type of collapse), I'm not sure the "don't hate the player" argument applies.
That' a very benign interpretation of what happened, and one that is naive of the nature of financial regulation. Specifically, you can't just rename "insurance" to "derivatives contract that pays out like insurance but with unregulated capital requirements (and please ignore the word 'insurance' - it has consequences)" and expect to get away with it.
Regulations are written to apply to everything that behaves like the regulated product. The people writing CDS knew exactly what they were doing. They just assumed they were so smart they would not be left holding the bag. Which is what everyone participating in a fraudulent scheme thinks.
Who buys CDS? Mom and Pop? If a used car salesman sells Grandma a lemon, that's not nice. Unless Grandma is also a used car salesman.
Getting off topic...