As bad as we'd imagined

Economics Intelligence puts it succinctly:

It takes a Nobel laureate to talk about banks, hedge funds and financial intermediation for half an hour without even mentioning the current financial crisis. Myron Scholes, the creator of the Black-Scholes formula who received the prize in 1997, accomplished this amazing achievement last week in Lindau, Germany.

Stiglitz's presentation is worth half an hour of the reader's life, however. The high point is possibly when he points out that the Federal Reserve Board's model of the American financial system does not include an input for the banks.

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