Word: wrongfulness
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...crisis. Taking on risk from instruments like credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) was treated as a profit center, often with little oversight of the mathematical models that spit out numbers about what it was all worth. The models proved spectacularly wrong because they precluded the possibility of an outsize event. Once big shocks, like declining home prices, started hitting, the models broke down. According to a report by a group of U.S. and international regulators, while some firms tried to understand what would happen to their models in truly adverse conditions, plenty of others didn...
Marvin [Nicholson], the trip director, came out to Senator Obama and whispered in his ear. Senator Obama said, "What's wrong with the plane?" Marvin said there was something wrong with the hydraulic system. He told us that we would be landing in a city other than our destination and that we might want to assume the brace position. [Obama] said, "What's that?" Marvin explained, and Obama's reaction was one word: "Golly." After we landed safely, the first thing he did was call his wife, who had been watching it on cable. Linda Douglass, Obama spokeswoman...
What is the future of risk? In the short term, an era of risk aversion is sure to continue, as financial outfits, gripped by the fear that something more will go wrong--loans not paid back, a company on the other side of a trade going bust--pull back on everything from the creation of complex securities to credit-card limits...
...from a slop trough of moneymaking into a business line like any other, one that requires human beings to ask the big-picture questions that computer models don't, like, What would happen if fundamental assumptions--house prices go up, institutions are too big to fail--prove to be wrong...
Then, of course, there's the Katie Couric factor. Will Americans be able to forget the shell-shocked Palin of those early network interviews? This may be her greatest handicap; you know what they say about second chances at first impressions. But here too, it would be wrong to count her out. A friend of Track Palin, the governor's teenage son, once told me about having dinner at the Palins' house from time to time. He remembered seeing his buddy's mom watching the evening news and taking notes. This was before the klieg lights of the national campaign...