Godzilla and Beaker Investigate the Credit Crunch

Finance has never been the natural home of philosopher kings. It is instead the home of the rapacious vultures, dead eyed killers and Brooks Bros clad Nazgul – financiers, neither living nor dead. Two things have happened recently which have made the whole things worse. One, the old rather pissed boys who wore pinstripes and did business over five hour lunches with old, equally pissed, chums from Eton or Yale have slowly left. These guys were no good (see The Great Depression for example) but they were pissed which meant they weren’t that quick. Now they have been replaced with guys who are sober (at least during the day – at night they like to take coke and abuse strippers or the homeless), sharp as blades and twice as morality free. The second bad thing is that we have given them really powerful computers and bunch of maths PHDs who should be doing physics to run them.