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To me, it raises this other fundamental question: if, in a case so high-profile such as rating the US debt, S&P and their best experts make a $2T mistake, then
by mrb 15y ago
To me, it raises this other fundamental question: if, in a case so high-profile such as rating the US debt, S&P and their best experts make a $2T mistake, then how much trust can we put in the financial rating industry at a whole?
- Estragon 15y agoThe erosion of faith goes deeper than that, as James Galbraith discusses in this talk from earlier in the year. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/james-galbraith-on-fraud-and-how-bad-economic-thinking-got-us-in-this-mess.html http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/james-galbraith-on-fr... This is the diagnosis of an irreversible disease. The corruption and collapse of the rule of law, in the financial sphere, is basically irreparable. It’s not just that restoring trust takes a long time. It’s that under the new technological order in this field, it can not be done. The technologies are designed to sow and foster distrust and that is the consequence of using them. The recent experience proves this, it seems to me. And therefore there can be no return to the way things were before. In other words, we are at the end of the illusion of a market place in the financial sphere.
- pyoung 15y agoThanks for the link. James is the son of famous economist and author, John Galbraith. A quote I pulled from his Wikipedia page: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
- Estragon 15y agoI like "Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."