The 2007-2008 financial crisis was a worldwide economic downturn that began in the United States. The crisis stemmed from banks lending subprime mortgages (in other words, lending mortgages to people at a high risk of not being able to pay the loans back), and the resulting burst of an unsustainable housing market. The values of subprime mortgage-backed securities plummeted, financial institutions took severe damage, and several major banks folded. The crisis spread across the globe, creating a large recession and major crises in countries like Iceland and Greece.
2007-2008 Financial Crisis Quotes in Weapons of Math Destruction
The Weapons of Math Destruction quotes below are all either spoken by 2007-2008 Financial Crisis or refer to 2007-2008 Financial Crisis. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2: Shell Shocked
Quotes
Paradoxically, the supposedly powerful algorithms that created the market, the ones that analyzed the risk in tranches of debt and sorted them into securities, turned out to be useless when it came time to clean up the mess and calculate what all the paper was actually worth. The math could multiply the horseshit, but it could not decipher it. This was a job for human beings. Only people could sift through the mortgages, picking out the false promises and wishful thinking and putting real dollar values on the loans.
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2007-2008 Financial Crisis Term Timeline in Weapons of Math Destruction
The timeline below shows where the term 2007-2008 Financial Crisis appears in Weapons of Math Destruction. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...But in the fall of 2008, after just a year at the company, everything changed—the financial crisis brought the economy to a halt.
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Chapter 7: Sweating Bullets
...their tones of voice and speech patterns could be analyzed for efficiency. And when the 2007 financial crisis hit, less-useful employees across the workforce were laid off based on the software’s determination of...
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