Tag: financial singularity
Financial singularity: where’s the kill switch?
“There is no kill switch; the minute you hit the send button on an algo it’s running and you can’t stop it,” says Ken Polcari, managing director at ICAP Equities and a 30-year veteran of the NYSE trading floor. “Maybe we do need to reflect on where the line is between humans and computers.” (Source: Financial Times)
Knight Capital Group is now world famous for coming this close to plunging to a fiery death. And its near-death experience might be one of the best signposts of the financial singularity. Continue Reading
The Financial Singularity comes to Amazon
Alice — of Wonderland fame– would say that our economy is getting “curiouser and curiouser.” Barney Jopson in the Financial Times tells us that prices on Amazon’s mega shopping site are changing as frequently as every 15 minutes because small merchants are now using the kind of high-speed trading tools usually seen on hedge fund trading floors to undercut their competitors. Continue Reading
Have we arrived at a financial singularity?
A couple of things have happened recently that beg the question: do we truly understand the risks that our largest banks are taking? (And this matters because, 4 years on from the financial crisis, taxpayers on both sides of the Atlantic are still being asked to stand behind the banks. See recent events in Spain.)
Professor Henry Hu, from the University of Texas School of Law, believes that we don’t understand these risks. And that’s because the banks, themselves, don’t either. In fact, they couldn’t even if they wanted to. Continue Reading
