Our Visionary Quants

Let me tell you about “Quants.” These are people who have done more for America than all the soldiers and marines whose body parts litter the sands of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan.. Without the Quants, America would still be a backwater capitalist economy mired in manufacturing and corporate responsibility. The Quants have freed us from this economic tar pit and given us the wings of Icarus with which we are soaring towards the Sun.

Quants are the quantative specialists who reduce reality to raw numbers dancing across a screen, numbers that transcend all that makes life such a hotbed of emotion, chaos and unpredictability.

Quants are convinced that neither death nor life, nor angles nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor all of creation can separate them from the neutered sterility of their numbers and formulae.

They have freed capital from the crude matter of manufactured goods, from the international borders than once held it captive; they have freed capital from society, from community, from all responsibility for those it exploits. Without the Quants, there would be no empire, no imperial wars, and no world dominance. They have replaced long-term vision with shot-term greed.

Their discipline is total; in place of souls, they have tightly wired programs that tolerate neither thought nor emotion. Their numbers are above criticism because they have convinced our corporatist elites that there is no reality outside of the number..

And they are the greatest pranksters the world has ever known because the numbers represent nothing: not gold, not silver not goods—nothing, nada! Theirs is Zen financing in which form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

However, America still awaits the immaculate conception of the ultimate Quant, the enlightened One who can walk on numbers and whose dedication is to total that he is the numbers dancing across a screen.

How will he know this Messiah is among us?

Simple. One day he will leave his Wall Street office and take the train home to his McMansion in Basking Ridge, NJ. When he arrives home, he will give his wife a peck on the cheek and tiptoe into the nursery where his baby sleeps in its crib. He will then murder the infant because he had crunched some numbers at the office and discovered that by killing the child, he has increased his family’s net worth by $1.6 million, given the cost of prestige nursery schools, private day schools, an elite high school, an Ivy League college, not to mention food, clothing, doctor bills and all the other incidental expenses that come with raising a child.

He will be our Savior, our Moses leading us to a Land flowing with debits and credits.