Sorry for these thoughts just dribbling out.

Senior Analyst
Deloitte and Touche
(Partnership; 10,001 or more employees; Accounting industry)
May 2002 — November 2004 (2 years 7 months)
Enterprise Risk Services

So, one year before he was analyzing Enterprise Risk, his neural faculties for risk analysis and judgment were not considered sufficiently matured for him to consume alcohol. Great. I wonder if he texts while driving. If he has to examine or enforce against anybody using David Li's formula, he will see it as depending on all the data about the past that he's used to seeing when his life flashes before his eyes.

If they wanted such a clear statement that they had no intention of enforcing anything, why didn't they choose Paris Hilton? Then at least the SEC could offset costs by washing cars.

If this guy gets axed, would it count as attrition or infant mortality? My guess is that he has the youth=smart credential because he got his MBA at 22. I'm really impressed that the Obama administration is seeking to underbid Google on diaperpin genii.

At any rate, this:

Storch has a strong background in technology systems and project management, Khuzami said in a statement. ''He will help to make us more efficient and nimble, and permit us to put more of our investigators on the front lines to detect and stop fraud,'' Khuzami said.

means I know even more people who were more qualified for his job than he is. And this:

Madoff, who pleaded guilty in March, is serving a 150-year sentence in federal prison in North Carolina for what could be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. It destroyed thousands of people's life savings, wrecked charities and gave the financial system another big jolt.

is ridiculous ostrich with its head in the sand stuff. The bailout, together with AIG, Deutschebank, and Goldman-Sachs, and the rest of the $300 Trillion dollar CDO/CDS topple tower was easily a 5000-fold bigger Ponzi scheme than anything Bernie Madoff did. I guess you have to wreck life savings in the New York media to count.

Oh, well. DARPA is hiring, the CIA is hiring, and jobs.phds is all quant positions for page after page after page. I guess they're trying to tell us something.

Thanks, correction accepted. I guess I thought that even at 29, they'd have shot a little higher than an MBA/CPA. This guy has Monica Goodling credentials.

Interesting point, bernbart. Where else? We already have it on good authority that the Fed or its Alumni control most of the editorial boards for economics journals, and to a great degree determine the first jobs of graduating Ph.D.'s in macroeconomics, regardless of whether it's academic or in the banking industry.

So there were no complaints when the Fed bailed out the "too big to fail" class, even though Bhatticharya's 2003 paper warned that this was the only way a finite Ponzi scheme could succeed. We even have post-defenders like Brad DeLong explaining why it is necessary, and perhaps it is. But Dr. DeLong does not explain why the bailout had to go through AIG, turning the entire economy into a huge bucket shop with a direct pipeline from the real economy to the nominal one. Neither does he explain why no regulations, even now, prohibit CDO^N derivatives which essentially allow infinite amounts of money in the nominal economy to be bet on arbitrarily bad debt, nor CDS instruments (AIG's favorite) which enable the bucket shop to suck the money out of our economy into very, very few pockets.

So perhaps the problem is that we hire economists to do these things, after it has become known that their field is corrupt, and specifically, a 29 year old, who can only get such a job by being one of the "smartest guys in the room".

I could personally make 4 to 5 phone calls and come up with several people well enough qualified in MCMC and gaussian copulas to do this job, but none of them would be economists. And none of them probably saw the job app. And none of them know any political intel traders in Washington, and none of them know anybody from Goldman Sachs. And none of them are 29 anymore. They're probably, what's the word they use to say they don't want your old person health insurance risk? Overqualified.

Careful. Goldman now has the assets to acquire Xe by hostile takeover, I'm sure.

You promised to cite sources. You have cited none. Is this due in a future installment or could you not find the links/book refs?

I dunno. Where I've lived, most of the convenience stores have been run by Marwaris and Sikhs. Not usually Muslims, but hey, they look different and that's all that counts in North Carolina.

You have to understand, much of North Carolina is composed of tribes who have been fighting against each other for centuries. It's not a state, it isn't even a place. It's just an empty place on the map. It's terra incognita. People who live there are a welter of different tribes, different language groups, different religious beliefs.

All over the state you find different people who have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that we call them North Carolinians, and they don't even call themselves Carolinians. They're Appalachians or they're from UNC, or they're from RTP SysAdmins or someone else. The things that hold them together are simply the things that we try to create artificially.

It's no wonder they think all people at convenience stores are alike.

The Arab Empire developed the modern university system. University of Fez was established in 859. The University in Timbuktu had 25,000 students in the 12th century. The first instance of the scientific method was by the Persian (from modern day Iraq) Alhazen, in his Book of Optics, 1021. The first real promoter of it in Europe was Roger Bacon, a Catholic, two centuries later.