"...Being in ops though isn't it mr hypocrite..."
I'd rather be a street walking whore turning tricks for 100 dollars a pop than be part of the Front Office. At least that way I could say I was doing honest work.
Quanthead is a real laugh-riot. People like him are responsible for the insolvency of the Western financial system, and here he is chest-thumping on something he knows nothing about. One would think that after the FO's manifold failures they would have the decency to at least lie low for a while. Heaven forbid!
Here is everything I have to say about these people:
www expatsingapore com/forum/index.php/topic,54370.0.html
And this bears repeating: Back in Q1 2009 when everyone was soiling their drawers about what they *thought* was going to happen here, posters like JBA, Agent 007/XYZ, Wasis, etc were bullish about the property market, and they turned out to be correct
In the real World (outside of Finance) bottom-line results still matter. These posters deserve their props.
This Vulcan character clearly has issues. His irrational hatred of all things "front office" suggests a personal history that pains him still now. Perhaps he wanted work work in the "front office" but didnt have what it takes, or hw worked there briefly in a very junior role and felt he was treated badly by traders etc who were irritated by his under performance?
Nothing he says about finance or the "front office" is rational. The idea that the quants have somehow been responsible for the collapse of the western financial system is ludicrously simplistic and inaccurate. Borrowers, lenders,, regulators, politicians, it is the sum of the collective greed and stupidity that led to the collapse. Blaming the quants is like blaming the factory worker that made the gearstick of the car that crashed when the driver was speeding and drunk.
What could we as a society have changed in order for the crash not to have happened? Go back 50 years, we shoudnt have encouraged all manufacturing to move to Asia etc, we should have not allowed excess borrowing on credit and mortgages, we should have regulated the system to prevent oversized mortgages versus income, we should have not encouraged huge property prices booms that the politicians loved, our central bankers should have managed money supply and rates to prevent the excess, the bankers should have better stress tested their models and looked at worst case scanarios, the corporates and governments should not have allowed unustainably high pensions, we shouldnt have allowed the growth of huge welfare systems, we shouldnt have allowed the Middle east and china to own the oil and commodity markets leaving us at their mercy....and oh yes, we should have been more careful of the spreadsheets the quants made in the banks but the seeds of the crash were sown decdes before Excel existed...
