Payback of the Geeks

Nerds and geeks have been targeted by bullies throughout history. Sand was kicked in Socrates’ face by a nameless. Galilleo was given a wedgee by a callous bastard son of a Vatican cardinal, and Einstein was forced to do the homework of a Viennese strong-arm thug. Bullying the weak or different has been a feature of childhood in almost every culture and there’s nothing a bully disliked more than a smarty pants. Bullies got the girls. Nerds got cooties. Ivy League jocks succeeded on Wall Street, despite their peanut-sized minds. Their cerebral shortcomings caught up with America this last decade, as the masters of the universe put a bullet into the American Dream. The entire financial system has been ruined by these idiots and now like a bully turning to a geek at the day before the final exams for help in a test, Wall Street and the other investment centers around the world have enlisted the aid of PhD mathematicians to rescue the global economy before the masses reject capitalism for another -ism starting with a C. Investment institutions are increasingly interested by algorithmic formulae to supplant the guessing and hunch technique of the glory boys of derivative trading and leveraged buy-outs. The high-frequency program tracks trends in the rise and fall of stocks based on statistics. Massive computers generate decisions within nano-seconds as Wall Street switches over to cruise control, allowing bankers and traders to blame a computer for an error in the system rather than their son-in-law, while they all vacation in the Hamptons. On May 6, 2010 the Dow Jones tanked 700 points or $800 billion in 15 minutes thanks to these QUANT programs. The losses were recovered by other mathematicians creating zombie accounting packages to obscure the depth of the disaster. Wall Street refused to reject the robot traders. They don’t get sick. They don’t want bonuses. They don’t sleep with their bosses’ daughters. 20% of trading is in the hands of computers controlled by geeks and nerds. The big bosses reward the boy geniuses, but none of them seem worried about the effects of bullying on a childhood mind. Geeks hate jocks and the best payback is the wallet. Beware of the Revenge of the Nerds. It could break the bank.