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Global Finance Is Sexier Than Sex
Yet another reason why we must all fall in love with mathematics.
We all have Richard Milhous Nixon to blame for this.
When the 37th American president made the all-important decision to end dollar gold convertibility in August 1973, not even he could have envisaged the degree to which the lives of billions around the world would be forever upended.
And yet it has.
The liberation of the dollar from the restraints of the Bretton woods agreement, was the building block of the financialization of the global economy or what some might call neoliberalism.
And what this single decision has done is to recreate, reimagine and reinvigorate mathematics.
It is imperative for all students of politics, history, geography and philosophy to know Maths has been at the heart of the neoliberal ideology, which has dominated our lives for the last forty-five years.
The very first quants who came on the scene recognized the power of numbers and how it could help predict the performances of stocks on which large bets were made.
Edward Oakley Thorp, who is very much with us, pioneered the quantitative approach to beat the markets in the 1960s, which is now common place.