that in markets, the tails are always fat. Stuck in their glass-walled palace far from New York’s teeming trading floors, they had forgotten that traders are not random molecules, or even mechanical logicians such as Hilibrand, but people moved by greed and fear, capable of the extreme behavior and swings of mood so often observed in crowds. And in the late summer of 1998, the bond-trading crowd was extremely fearful, especially of risky credits. The professors hadn’t modeled this. They had programmed the market for a cold predictability that it had never had; they had forgotten the predatory,
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