Tag Archives: Gaussian Bell Curve
Let’s face it; Economists are charlatans!
At the New Yorker summit Robert Shiller and Nassim Taleb discuss what to do in such times when the spirits aren’t brave at all. Shiller, a Yale economist who famously predicted the last two booms also wrote a book called “Animal Spirits in which he posits that shifts in the economy follow the irrational actions of [...]
The Rise and Fall of the Gaussian Copula Function
Felix Salmon has a terrific cover story in this month’s Wired on the all-too-seductive Gaussian Copula function, which made it easy to calculate risk on Wall Street. Take a big basket of financial instruments, each with their own risks, through them into the Copula function, and presto: you get the net risk. It was so [...]