Choosing Winners and Losers in Finance

Talking Tuesdays with Fancy Quant

The finance industry seems to be following the social movement of adding bias and personal opinions instead of allowing the invisible hand of capitalism to properly assign and balance resources and outcomes.
Consulting firms are now coming up with politically driven definitions of bias instead of using the mathematical definition and customers can choose their definitions. From a logical standpoint, choosing a definition is the opposite of non-bias. This approach of choosing your definition means models will be biased in the direction a firm wants even when the true data does not support it. This will have negative impacts in finance (fair lending practices), marketing campaigns (firms trying to push their narrative), and I'm sure other areas I can't think of.
The new mortgage proposal to redistribute wealth from financial responsible people to irresponsible people is another example of the push towards socialism and away from capitalism. This new rule reminds me of the 2007/2008 mortgage crisis in the sense that people are trying to get those not financially stable to buy houses they can't afford. I remember the logic that if the requirement to have a down payment on a house was removed, we would get the "historically unable to purchase a home" into houses. The not surprising result was that people who couldn't afford homes bought homes and then defaulted. This new rule will have similar results. You can't fake financial stability.

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1. Choosing Winners and Losers in Finance (00:00:00)

2. [Ad] Real Talk About Marketing (00:10:25)

3. (Cont.) Choosing Winners and Losers in Finance (00:11:13)