Wealth & Money Quote by Øystein Stray Spetalen

Spetalen’s jab lands because it’s less a technical claim than a provocation aimed at the priesthood of modern capitalism: the experts with models, acronyms, and a veneer of inevitability. Coming from a businessman, it reads like class warfare inside the elite. He’s not attacking markets from the outside; he’s accusing the people paid to translate risk into numbers of fumbling the translation, then getting rewarded anyway.

“Economists can’t do math” is obviously overstated, which is the point. The line isn’t about arithmetic; it’s about misplaced faith in quantification. The subtext is that the industry’s math is performative: complex enough to intimidate regulators and impress boards, but brittle in the face of human behavior, feedback loops, and incentives. If you can package uncertainty as precision, you can sell leverage as safety. That’s how “risk management” becomes a marketing department.

The “every twenty years” rhythm gives the insult its sting. It frames banking crises not as freak accidents but as a predictable business cycle of amnesia: deregulate, innovate, overextend, collapse, clean up, repeat. The number is elastic (2008, 1990s crises, the 1970s), but the cadence feels true because the same story keeps reappearing with new jargon.

Spetalen’s intent is to puncture authority and shift blame away from abstract forces (“the market”) toward human institutions that manufacture confidence. It’s also self-serving in a telling way: a financier insisting the problem is the eggheads’ equations, not the system that demands comforting equations in the first place.