“To model correctly one tranche of one CDO took about three hours on one of the fastest computers in the United States. There is no chance that pretty much anybody understood what they were doing with these securities. Creating things that you don’t understand is really not a good idea no matter who owns it.” In short, both high-speed trading and complex derivatives tilt financial markets away from human control and understanding. But they do more than that. They have cut their anchor to the human economy of real goods and services. As Bill Janeway noted to me, the bursting of what he calls
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