Asia Sentinel

A friend pointed me to an article by Felix Salmon on the Wired Magazine website, entitled "Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street".

The article explains in the best layman terms possible the intricate mathematical models used by Wall Street to price the mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. I don’t pretend that I understand every word in the article, but it does give me a more enlightening glimpse into the almost inscrutable world of 'quant' (to me anyway) and what must be one of the most crucial underlying factors that sent the financial house of dominos crumbling.

Here are some highlights, but they don’t do justice to the article, which is worth reading in its entirety despite its length.

"It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. And Li didn't just radically dumb down the difficulty of working out correlations; he decided not to even bother trying to map and calculate all the nearly infinite relationships between the various loans that made up a pool. What happens when the number of pool members increases or when you mix negative correlations with positive ones? Never mind all that, he said. The only thing that matters is the final correlation number—one clean, simple, all-sufficient figure that sums up everything."

"In hindsight, ignoring those warnings looks foolhardy. But at the time, it was easy. Banks dismissed them, partly because the managers empowered to apply the brakes didn't understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop."

"In finance, you can never reduce risk outright; you can only try to set up a market in which people who don't want risk sell it to those who do. But in the CDO market, people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn't have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn't have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some."

"Bankers securitizing mortgages knew that their models were highly sensitive to house-price appreciation. If it ever turned negative on a national scale, a lot of bonds that had been rated triple-A, or risk-free, by copula-powered computer models would blow up. But no one was willing to stop the creation of CDOs, and the big investment banks happily kept on building more, drawing their correlation data from a period when real estate only went up."

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