ABSTRACT
The scientifi c worldview was very much operative in the fi nancial Armageddon described in the previous chapter. Government offi cials and fi nancial executives alike came to believe in the quantitative models that were used by fi nancial institutions and thought these models allowed these institutions to measure and control the risk they were taking on so that the system was deemed safe and beyond crashing. That this was a misplaced belief is now all too evident, but at the time it seemed a reasonable approach and was part and parcel of the worldview that prevailed with respect to fi nancial activities. Quantitative models gave investors and fi nancial institutions a sense of certainty and confi dence they knew what they were doing.
