So I’m on this mailing list for quants at Wilmott. The folks at Wilmott are interested in personality types working in quantitative finance. I took the test. It was spot on for me. I’m considered “rational”. There are subtypes. Here is my subtype. The description does contain a lot of puffery designed to boost your self esteem. They don’t mention any nasty famous people who were the same type as me, or for any other type. It’s like the Lake Wobegon of personalities. That said, some of the non-puffery stuff was pretty accurate.
At any rate, that’s not what I was writing about. What caught my eye was when I clicked on other so-called rational types — in particular, masterminds. I couldn’t help but notice that in the pictures at the top of the page were Greenspan and Bernanke. I then read the text, which described their personality type. It contained this laugh-out-loud gem, “Masterminds are head and shoulders above all the rest in contingency planning. Complex operations involve many steps or stages, one following another in a necessary progression, and Masterminds are naturally able to grasp how each one leads to the next, and to prepare alternatives for difficulties that are likely to arise any step of the way. Trying to anticipate every contingency, Masterminds never set off on their current project without a Plan A firmly in mind, but they are always prepared to switch to Plan B or C or D if need be.”
Always prepared for every contingency? Are you kidding me? It was Greenspan who had no Plan B if his ultra-loose monetary policy in 2003-2005 created unintended consequences later. What we got was a global asset price bubble that drove up house and commodity prices worldwide. It was Greenspan and Rubin who had no Plan B if their obstruction of regulating derivatives in 1998 had unintended consequences later. What we got were leverage ratios that stagger the mind in their scale. Perhaps if we had had people in positions of power who actually did have a Plan B for what to do if they were wrong, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
