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  • How maths killed Lehman Brothers

    About as lucid an exposition of the elephantine errors that, it seems, not one of the allegedly very clever (and certainly very highly paid) members of the financial classes managed to spot. But, I think there was more to it than that. I cannot believe that many of these senior finance... more

    Reviewed by grumpy-steve Jul 20, 02:45pm ( 23 reviews ) • maths.org

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  • Rated by Windexglow on Aug 04, 11:05pm

    Finally, an article without "funny" analogies or be extremely biased.

  • Rated by daisydahlia on Aug 03, 9:14am

    Read it a while back, insightful reading.

  • Rated by grumpy-steve on Jul 20, 2:45pm

    About as lucid an exposition of the elephantine errors that, it seems, not one of the allegedly very clever (and certainly very highly paid) members of the financial classes managed to spot. But, I think there was more to it than that. I cannot believe that many of these senior finance "wizards" were really that blind and stupid. No, they had made their own, private, calculation: to go along with the boom for as long as it lasted because even if many of them must have known that they were driving the economy into the rocks, they knew also that they were in prime position to make off with large amounts of prime booty from the inevitable ensuing wreckage. They enjoyed it while it lasted and, even if they are not now as wealthy as they were once believed to be, they have still managed to appropriate a gloriously disproportionate volume of resources for their own personal use. This is willful fraud on an epic scale, with thousands of callous co-conspiritors. We must never again allow greedy clever people to convince us that finance in and of itself is a way of generating wealth. It isn't - it's just a way of deploying it, and, where it is portrayed as an end in itself, it must be seen that it has become perverted and pernicious.

  • Rated by mosleyj on Jul 09, 8:22pm

    good read!

  • Rated by too-tall on Jul 02, 8:35pm

    Hooray for Horatio and his dad. Good luck to you both. I enjoyed the article. Even though it pretty much repeats what I've heard before. It was the fact that you had these sophisticated models that apparently no one was adapting for changing market conditions. Couple this with the fact that no one was exploring adverse scenarios which were thought unlikely and you have the disaster. Oh, and the top managers never did really understand what they were buying into. Like all disasters in sophisticated systems this one was caused my multiple failures or adverse events deemed so unlikely by the groups in charge that they never took the possibility seriously. You always have to assess the possibility that you are totally wrong and estimate the resulting downside risks.

  • Rated by TexNYC on Jun 25, 10:55am

    worth reading.

  • Reviewed by Baldrin on Jun 25, 9:06am

    Math didn't kill Lehman Brothers. Stupidity and greed killed Lehman Brothers. And what kind of investment banker listens to math and physics PhDs? You don't see CERN getting reports from accountants on how to best measure the Higgs Boson.

  • Reviewed by dnanos on Jun 25, 7:24am

    From the page: "How maths killed Lehman Brothers "

  • Rated by aryyudha on Jun 24, 9:45pm

    Website review of How maths killed Lehman Brothers in Mathematics

  • Reviewed by texnofile on Jun 22, 7:01pm

    This article talks about subtle errors leading to big mistakes, and the article is a prime example! The problem was not the math or the document with the formula --- it is that the big wigs didn't understand. Math didn't kill Lehman Brothers. Not understanding math killed Lehman Brothers