Now if your kids ask you why they have to learn math, you can tell them, “Because if you don’t, you could ruin the global economy, you little beast.” Wired has just published an article that traces the entire clusterfrak back to a formula published in 2000 by a mathemetician working for JPMorgan Chase. Bankers loved its simplicity but completely misused it—despite warnings from academics that it was flawed—to turn pretty much every security into a triple-A, no-risk fabrication.
