On Bloomberg Terminals

“11. Bloomberg Terminals. Because they led Wall Street to believe it was invincible. If you wanted to play the futures market on the commodity price of bulk clams in Manila, the Bloomberg machines could do it. If you wanted to leverage egg prices in Bulgaria against the long bond in Brazil, and pay for it in yen, they could do that, too. Hell, if you wanted to eventually self-finance a run for mayor of New York City, underwritten by the idea that information is currency, and the fact that these terminals had become the mandatory desktop toy for every budding financial master of the universe, you couldn’t invent a better A.T.M. They were all-knowing, and all-powerful. Still, for all their financial wizardry, there was also the law of unintended consequences: If you give enough monkeys enough typewriters, you may get Shakespeare. But if you give enough electronic monkeys enough high-tech typewriters, sooner or later you’ll definitely get a financial meltdown.”

One of the 100 reasons that Vanity Fair gave for the market collapse of 2007.

From one of my favorite blogs, Socializing Finance.