Since the early 90s I have been warning that all this nonsense would all end in tears – I am called “the Angell of Doom” because of my predictions about the control freaks who think they are immune to the uncertainty implicit in the real world. Number mysticism, aided and abetted by computer technology, has turned the world’s financial markets into a huge global casino. First we had ‘the chartists’, who claimed to predict stock movements by pattern matching, as if the market was some recurring dendrochronology. Then came the ‘Masters of the Universe’ and their mathematical models. Developed by the likes of Nobel Laureates Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, these methods are designed to beat the system. Accordingly, hedge funds leverage already huge amounts of money into astronomical sums that are then placed as bets. These ‘big swinging dicks’ of Wall Street and the City of London believe in the mathematical guarantee of ‘riskless risk’, that they can beat the system.

Ian Angell: It will all end in tears