Empirical Media Theory

barthel:

soupsoup:

Trader tells a speechless BBC: “The Collapse Is Coming…And Goldman Rules The World” (by fal2grace)

Eh, finance people have been saying this shit for decades. It makes them feel more important to say that they have the power to ruin everything. (Fox does the same thing!) But it’s just an ego-stroke. If traders could actually see financial disasters coming, a lot fewer people in the finance sector would have lost their jobs in 2008. Traders are really bad at actually understanding politics, which is why the oil market spikes when things happen in the Middle East that have nothing to do with the oil supply. It flatters the profession’s self-image to think that it’s more important than governments, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

I mean, if we learned anything from the crash, it’s that the kind of people now working in the finance industry don’t really know what the hell they’re doing, right?They can observe cause and effect and replicate that, but they don’t really understand why shit happens - and understanding why shit happens is the only way to predict what’s going to happen in the future, when conditions change. If finance folks couldn’t see the cascading credit default swap collapse coming (or, at least, couldn’t see when it was coming), then why would any of them know where we’re going from here? The fact that we all believe this bro says a lot more about the high regard in which we continue to hold finance people than it does about the truth of his accusations. They’re not high priests reading portents invisible to the rest of us. This is one dude in a suit interpreting information we can all see. It seems to me that his signal of expertise - “I’m a trader!” - is worth about as much now as a share in the Madoff fund. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong. But the apparent insistence that he’s right because he’s a trader makes me think we haven’t learned a goddamned thing from this mess.