Martin Meenagh blog

Bankers went Mad

Hahaha. Two Cambridge University Scientists have just provided the global middle classes with the non sin-based reasoning they crave.

Basically, a survey of London German futures trading floors suggest that testosterone and cortisol levels go haywire after a long series of stressful, but succesful trades. This in turn alters the male brain, aided and abetted presumably by the ingestion of ambient cocaine and the general quality of being a d**khead that seems to be a requirement of the trading floor.

To quote Andrew Leonard at salon.com, the ultimate result of this application of the science of rational economic decision-making was the insight that

Participation in high-reward, high stress occupations like derivatives trading warps your brain chemistry. People with unbalanced brain chemistry make bad decisions. Every time Wall Street bubbles over, it becomes a factory for producing hopped-up-on-steroids madmen who think they are chasing woolly mammoths, but are actually stabbing themselves in the kidneys.

And the rest of us.... were there no women on trading floors, then, or were they all down the industrial tribunal at the time the research was taking place?

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