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by Goopplesoft 3152 days ago
This reads like a case study in one of Nassim Taleb's books.

> stress, competition, and choice involved in trading financial instruments naturally give rise to illusions of control

> I’d never really experienced the extreme tail of a probability distribution firsthand. And that experience disabused me of more than one illusion.

> But what’s the alternative to estimating probabilities?

The implied inevitability of another crisis over the new-ish stress tests is very saddening. I wonder what can be done.

> The danger is that the financial system and its regulators are moving to a narrow risk-model gene pool that is highly vulnerable to the next financial virus,” he wrote. “By discouraging innovation in risk models, we risk sowing the seeds of our next systemic crisis.