LTCM - Hubris (or, moral hazard)

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Aug 1 15:53:29 PDT 1999


Rakesh Bhandari wrote:


>Peter,
>thank you for this helpful download.
>Angela raised sometime ago a question about the transition from commodity
>to fiat money. What about the transition to electronic money? I know Joel
>Kurtzman wrote an interesting, fact filled book about this a few years
>ago; and there is a new book by Robt Solomon I believe on the topic. Aside
>from electronic transactions per se, it sure does not seem that the kind
>of arbitrage LTCM attempted would have been possible without very powerful
>IT. So what's the relationship between technology and money today? Robt
>Gordon may claim that new techs are less epochal in nature, but perhaps
>money is already acting in funny new unprecedented ways on the basis of
>advances in information technology?
>yours, rakesh

How was LTCM all so fundamentally different from other financial crises of the past? Sure, earlier plungers lacked access to the wondrous instruments today's hedge funds play with, but people have been doing a lot of damage by leveraging other people's money for centuries.

Doug



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