When boys rule

It was a Friday so most Congressmen were out of town shoring up the next election. The woman giving me a tour of D.C. had connections enough to slip us into a member's office on the Capitol. Two twentysomethings were all we found in the little suite of rooms, and my guide seemed to know one of the youths' fathers and chatted amicably for a few minutes. After we walked out, she leaned in and said to me softly, "I'm concerned; kids are running our country, writing defense bills."

Who knows? But Wall Street whiz kids are no secret. The Washington Post wrote on August 21, 2007:

"Instead of veteran market-savvy traders waving fistfuls of sell slips, the elite quant funds employ Nobel nerds with math PhDs, often divorced from the real world. It's not for nothing that they are called 'black-box' funds---opaque to outsiders, the boxes contain investment magic understood by only the wizards who conjured it up. . . . As elegant as the models are, they cannot predict unpredictable events, or human panic, some traders say."

That was a year and a half---and an eternity---ago. Ground zero of the AIG meltdown seems to be the London office on the fifth floor of Curzon Street, where whiz-kids-gone-wild had fun with new toys called derivatives and swaps. It evidently became the tail that wagged the matronly AIG dog.

According to Scripture, one sign of a society turned upside-down is that children rule:

"My people---infants are their oppressors. And women rule over them. O my people, your guides mislead you and they have swallowed up the course of your paths" (Isaiah 3:12).

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