The financial system was deliberately built to confuse its own architects.

Evidence

Maureen Tkacik caught a glimpse of what is disturbing about the plenitude of Monday-morning quarterbacking: … What was easy to convey was that something about the past ten years had been unsustainable. But the truth—that an entire ideology had been unsustainable—is one that we have not yet grasped. And that is why so many journalists, economists, intellectuals and financiers now scramble to churn out books that for the most part read like the memoirs of people trying to make themselves feel less stupid. The current financial system was constructed to make us all feel stupid, and in the process of building it the architects allowed themselves to become stupid as well. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 35

Categorization

• SEED: Could seed an essay on complexity-as-power: how designed incomprehensibility in finance functions as a defense against regulation.
• XREF: connects to: Modern financial markets are deliberately designed entities — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1235; Financial derivatives grew complex enough that their own creators could not understand them — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 223

Broader Connections

• Modern financial markets are deliberately designed entities #expands (0.82) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1235