语篇读译：

A Formula for Economic Calamity

The market crash of 2008 that plunged the world into the economic recession from which it is still reeling had many causes. One of them was mathematics. Financial investment firms had developed such complex ways of investing their clients’ money that they came to rely on arcane formulas to judge the risks they were taking on. Yet as we learned so painfully three year ago, those formulas, or models, are only pale reflections of the real world, and sometimes they can be woefully misleading.

It was the supposed strength of risk models that gave investment firms the confidence to leverage their bets with massive sums of borrowed money. The models would tell them how risky these bets were and what other investments would offset that risk. Yet the huge uncertainties in the models gave them false confidence.

With so much at stake, in the past three years financial firms have spent tens of millions of dollars in buttressing their models of investment risk in the hope that new ones will preclude anything like the 2008 collapse from happening again. But that may be a vain hope or a case of wishful thinking. Experts in financial models have serious doubts about whether risk models can be improved in any fundamental way. What this means is as obvious as it is scary: banks and investment firms are leading the global economy into a future that is at great risk of repeating the past.