One of the pluses of working in a newsroom is when smart people walk by your desk and tell you interesting things. One of the pluses of subscribing to a newspaper is the followup part, where the smart people write it all down, and then people stay up all night to print it up and throw it on your driveway. This morning’s case in point is my colleague Win Quigley’s explanation of risk models:

Wall Street was doing the equivalent of flying an airplane with an altimeter that says you’re 1,000 feet higher than you really are. It works great, just so long as you’re more than 1,000 feet off the ground.