Niall Ferguson offers a sweeping historical explanation — the clearest and broadest I’ve seen — of the financial crisis, including a delicious (to me) critique of the arrogant "quants" (quantitative whiz-kids) who created a "Planet Finance" in the sky and led us over the cliff. Is not the creation and bursting of bubbles endemic in the modern project of mastery, which requires a kind of rolling, snowballing conspiracy against given limits? Is there not something of the pyramid scheme in the compulsion always to raise the bid on the wager that more power will lead something good, a good ever deferred by the a newer, higher bid? Not that there’s anything wrong with that . . .
