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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

After every crisis or crash, the financial engineers always seem to find a new way to put us all at risk.

Well, it always seems a race to the bottom. Remember when Google was good until SEO got involved? I imagine a similar arms race will happen with LLMs. And with sports, every new rule ends up being abused. Last time I attended a basketball game, the last quarter was basically just constantly whistles from the ref.

More likely google was good until they realized they made more money showing you garbage, as long as it was filled with google ads.

I don't for a minute believe that the SEO folks outsmarted Google's engineers.

This isn’t the financial engineers. This is just greedy lenders preying on consumers by offering them loans they really can’t afford, and people constantly bombarded by marketing messages telling them to spend beyond their means and finance it with credit. The financial engineering here is basically zero.

If there's no financial engineering, who cares if some sketchy lenders go bust?

Probably most people outside the Wall St bubble don’t care very much. However if some of these financial institutions take big hits that could cause ripples in the broader “real” economy that might have a bigger impact. Given the current backdrop of inflation and uncertainty due to tariffs etc this could be bad but it’s hard to say how bad.

Although people have tried to make the financial system more resilient since the 2008 crisis, it’s really impossible to say how well those measures will hold up until they are really tested, which isn’t a very comforting thought. It’s very unlikely (in my opinion) that things melt down in exactly the same way as last time, but there’s nothing to say they won’t find a new and exciting (slightly) different way to melt down. Financial engineering isn’t the only thing that can cause a financial crisis.

... except locking these financially illiterate victims into bad conditions.

That’s not financial engineering though. That’s predatory lending.

Financial engineering can enable predatory lending by repacking low quality debt into complex securities that are easier to sell.

It happened with sub-prime lending that ended with the 1008 crash. I do not know whether it is a significant factor with private credit now.

What separates predatory lending from being a form of financial engineering?

They simply are completely different things.

Financial engineering refers to the creation of complex financial products (usually derivatives) using techniques from financial mathematics[1].

Predatory lending is just lending to people who can’t afford to borrow. No engineering of any kind involved.

[1] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/financial-mo...

I mean, we've been making it really easy on them.

It's not like the government has been carefully introducing new, strict regulations on the things they were doing that got us into the crash once we've recovered from it. We just...let things stay as they are. Because half of Congress is white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel trying doggedly to keep us pointed toward the cliff, and the other half is dithering about wondering if it's too rude and partisan to gently take the wheel and try to turn it away from certain doom.

It's not even a new way. They never fixed the old one that crashed the world in 2007.

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