3 chapters across the catalog
The history of the Internet is traced from its origins as a distributed network designed to survive nuclear attacks to its current centralized state. A personal anecdote describes how Enron attempted to hire a firm to build a "fictitious" trading desk for bandwidth trading that was purely for show. This era marked the transition of the Internet from a university-based peering system to a commercialized commodity.
Mortgage Foreclosure Crisis, Derivative Trading Systems, Lotus Notes
The ongoing foreclosure crisis is described as an unraveling of the unregulated derivatives market. Personal experience building a trading system for Bankers Trust in 1995 reveals that many complex financial agreements were documented poorly using faxes, Excel spreadsheets, and Lotus Notes databases. This lack of a paper trail makes determining true ownership of mortgage deeds nearly impossible for courts.
Banking Industry Culture, Enron and California Energy Crisis
The discussion shifts to the perceived lack of ethics and intelligence among high-level bankers and traders involved in structured deals and derivatives. Dvorak compares the current financial instability to the 2001 California energy crisis, characterizing the rolling blackouts as a manufactured scam by Enron that was ignored by Governor Gray Davis and the media.
