One of the most alarming things about the crisis in the global financial system is that the warning signs have been out there for some time, yet no one heeded them. Exactly 10 years ago, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) failed to convince investors that it could repay its debts, thereby bringing the world to the brink of a similar “liquidity crisis” to the one we now see. Disaster was averted then only because regulators managed to put together a multi-billion-dollar bailout package.
LTCM’s collapse was particularly notable because its founders had set great store by their use of statistical models designed to keep tabs on the risks inherent in their investments. Its fall should have been a wake-up call to banks and their regulatory supervisors that the models were not working as well as hoped-in particular that they were ignoring the risks of extreme events and the connections that send such events reverberating around the financial system. Instead, they carried on using them?
Now that disaster has struck again, some financial risk modelers-the "quant’s" who have wielded so much influence over modern banking-are saying they know where the gaps in their knowledge are and are promising to fill them. Should we trust them?
Their track record does not inspire confidence. Statistical models have proved almost useless at predicting the killer risks for individual banks, and worse than useless when it comes to risks to the financial system as a whole. The models encouraged bankers to think they were playing a high-stakes card game, when what they were actually doing was more akin to lining up a row of dominoes.
How could so many smart people have gotten it so wrong? One reason is that their faith in their model’s predictive power led them to ignore what was happening in the real world. Finance offers enormous scope for dissembling: almost any failure can be explained away by a judicious choice of language and data. When investors do not behave like the self-interested homo economics that economists suppose them to be, they are described as being "irrationally exuberant" or blinded by panic. An alternative view-that investors are reacting logically in the face of uncertainty-is rarely considered. Similarly, extreme events are described as happening only "once in a century"-even though there is insufficient data on which to base such an assessment.
The quant’s' models might successfully predict the movement of markets most of the time, but the bankers who rely on them have failed to realize that the occasions on which the markets deviate from normality are much more important than those when they comply. The events of the past year have driven this home in a spectacular fashion: by some estimates, the banking industry has lost more money in the current crisis than it has made in its entire history.
1.What happened a decade ago in the financial world（ ）.
2.The statistical models used by LTCM （ ）.
3.What does the author think is the major cause of the current financial crisis?
4.It can be inferred from the passage that risk control of the financial market（ ）.
