Panic on Wall Street

"Panic on Wall Street: brokers feeling melancholy."
"Good times coming"
"Good times have arrived"
"Listening to the strains of genuine Negro ragtime, brokers forget their cares"

Scott Joplin, Panic on Wall Street Rag-time: programme notes

The upside is that this mess has pushed Republican lies off page one.

Lehmann Brothers is going bankrupt because financial instruments over the past thirty years have become woven together by computer software. In the old days, the human mind, trust, and pencils and paper bounded complexity. Today, a dizzying variety of financial instruments and their interlinks is created by software, and software programmers, especially Wall Street whores, never really either understood nor cared about software reliability. Instead, I saw people, esp. women, lose jobs for insisting on reliability, and I saw the Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, one of the few computer scientists to give a shit about reliability, ostracised at conferences.

In fact, some of the complexity of the world financial system, which has introduced uncertainty and consequently panic, is mathematically ineradicable. If part of a financial instrument's contract mentions another contract at n steps, those two instruments will continue to to spin in financial cyberspace forever, a sort of financial plutonium. Their uncertainty is inherited by any container, whether that is another financial instrument or a bank that owns the strange spin.