Psychotraders

Remember a few weeks ago when a rogue trader at UBS, Kweku Adoboli, was arrested for squandering 2 billion dollars of the bank's funds on a risky investment scheme? A similar caper was discovered in France a few years ago when Jerome Kerviel blew a few billion francs on his own scam. Here in the United States J.P. Morgan helped start our own recession after peddling their trashy paper to Merrill Lynch.

There may be a very good reason that these events occur. A new study by the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland shows that stockbrokers are actually more reckless and manipulative than psychopaths. After reading an abstract on the findings, I suppose that we should treat the pathological and predacious conduct of the folks on Wall Street with a bit more sympathy and understanding. These people are merely very sick. Like the scorpion who hitches the ride on the duck's back, it is their essential nature to be sociopathic.

From Spiegel:


Researchers at the Swiss research university measured the readiness to cooperate and the egotism of 28 professional traders who took part in computer simulations and intelligence tests. The results, compared with the behavior of psychopaths, exceeded the expectations of the study's co-authors, forensic expert Pascal Scherrer, and Thomas Noll, a lead administrator at the Pöschwies prison north of Zürich.


"Naturally one can't characterize the traders as deranged," Noll told SPIEGEL. "But for example, they behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test."


Particularly shocking for Noll was the fact that the bankers weren't aiming for higher winnings than their comparison group. Instead they were more interested in achieving a competitive advantage. Instead of taking a sober and businesslike approach to reaching the highest profit, "it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents," Noll explained. "And they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents."


Using a metaphor to describe the behavior, Noll said the stockbrokers behaved as though their neighbor had the same car, "and they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves."


The researchers were unable to explain this penchant for destruction, they said.