Falling housing prices, crashing stock markets, contracting credit: Even the experts seem bewildered by the current economic crisis. Quantitative analysts (quants)-the whiz-kid financial engineers whose algorithms have dominated Wall Street trading in recent years-have watched those algorithms fail. Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan acknowledged in October that there was "a flaw in the model that I perceived ... defines how the world works." U.S. Treasury Secre-tary Henry Paulson flip-flops about the most effective way to spend an increasingly inadequate-seeming $700 billion of taxpayer money.
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