From Technology Review, a look at how the financial engineers known as "quants" contributed to Wall Street's summer of scary numbers (and part 2). Have we learned the lessons of Black Monday? Why another financial meltdown is more likely than ever. History as written by grumpy old men: A review of Blue Blood and Mutiny: the Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley by Patricia Beard. John Kay reviews Imperfect Knowledge Economics by Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg. What is "mechanism design"? Explaining the research that won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics, and why you should care; here is a summary of the contributions, and why it matters for policy-making. When it comes to economics, it is the award itself that has sometimes come in for sneers; even a couple of its winners have suggested it be abolished.
