{"id":438823,"date":"2010-03-17T12:11:22","date_gmt":"2010-03-17T16:11:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kempton.wordpress.com\/?p=10477"},"modified":"2010-03-17T12:11:22","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T16:11:22","slug":"22-year-old-harvard-student-told-story-of-the-cdo-market-meltdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/438823","title":{"rendered":"22-year-old Harvard student told story of the CDO market meltdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpt from WSJ Blog “Michael Lewis\u2019s \u2018The Big Short\u2019? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead!<\/a><\/strong>“,<\/p>\n

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“Last October, [Ana Katherine] Barnett-Hart, already pulling all-nighters at the bank (we agreed to not name her employer), received a call from Lewis, who had heard about her thesis from a Harvard doctoral student. Lewis was blown away.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a classic example of the innocent going to Wall Street and asking the right questions,\u201d said Mr. Lewis, who in his 20s wrote \u201cLiar\u2019s Poker,\u201d considered a defining book on Wall Street culture. \u201cHer thesis shows there were ways to discover things that everyone should have wanted to know. That it took a 22-year-old Harvard student to find them out is just outrageous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barnett-Hart says she wasn\u2019t the most obvious candidate to produce such scholarship. She grew up in Boulder, Colo., the daughter of a physics professor and full-time homemaker. A gifted violinist, Barnett-Hart deferred admission at Harvard to attend Juilliard, where she was accepted into a program studying the violin under Itzhak Perlman. After a year, she headed to Cambridge, Mass., for a broader education. There, with vague designs on being pre-Med, she randomly took \u201cEc 10,\u201d the legendary introductory economics course taught by Martin Feldstein”<\/p>\n

[…] She emailed scores of Harvard alumni. One pointed her toward LehmanLive, a comprehensive database on CDOs. She received scores of other data leads. She began putting together charts and visuals, holding off on analysis until she began to see patterns\u2013how Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were the top originators, how collateral became heavily concentrated in subprime mortgages and other CDOs, how the credit ratings procedures were flawed, etc.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you just randomly start regressing everything, you can end up doing an unlimited amount of regressions,\u201d she said, rolling her eyes. She says nearly all the work was in the research; once completed, she jammed out the paper in a couple of weeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly impressive piece of work,\u201d said Jeremy Stein, a Harvard economics professor who included the thesis on a reading list for a course he\u2019s teaching this semester on the financial crisis. \u201cShe pulled together an enormous amount of information in a way that\u2019s both intelligent and accessible.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Check out the above very readable WSJ blog interview<\/a>. Have a look of Anna’s thesis “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis<\/a><\/strong>“. And most important of all, learn from Anna’s “can do” spirit even when her professors encouraged her to quit and find something easier to work on.<\/p>\n

Yes, the article ends with “Ah, the innocence of youth.” But I like to remind people of the Margaret Mead quote I love to use<\/a>. And this is what Anna did before she entered Harvard,<\/p>\n

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“A gifted violinist, Barnett-Hart deferred admission at Harvard to attend Juilliard, where she was accepted into a program studying the violin under Itzhak Perlman<\/a>.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[via Gary Shiu<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Filed under: Business<\/a>, Economics<\/a>, ethics<\/a>, insightful<\/a>, investment<\/a>, united states<\/a>, World<\/a>, World Affairs<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpt from WSJ Blog “Michael Lewis\u2019s \u2018The Big Short\u2019? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead!“, “Last October, [Ana Katherine] Barnett-Hart, already pulling all-nighters at the bank (we agreed to not name her employer), received a call from Lewis, who had heard about her thesis from a Harvard doctoral student. Lewis was blown away. \u201cIt was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":841,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-438823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/841"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}