Excel wasn’t the problem at JP Morgan. There was a reckless culture that thumbed its nose at rules, ignored the guidance of review committees, and tried to sweep things under the rug when they got caught. That would have happened whether the models were written in Excel or Ruby.
If anything, Excel promotes transparency in finance by allowing more people to read the "source" (even the bankers). Cutely named forgotten programmes written in J were a more fecund source of problems.
Agreed. They were doing CDS deals. Every bank I've worked at has their models in COM assemblies that can be consumed by Excel. Excel lets the traders value their instruments using the models. The inputs may have been copy-paste but I'd be hard pressed to believe that the risk numbers were generated by hand in Excel unless this was some very exotic instrument which I don't think it was.
Risk numbers aren't generated by Excel but an automated process that uses the same assemblies.
have you tried reverse engineering someone else's non-trivial spreadsheet? a programmer might build a good spreadsheet but the average person builds a nest of lookups and hacked up nested if/then statements. seriously, i think spreadsheets are un-auditable - the only way to double check something is to write your own version and check the output... now you've got 2 problems...
If anything, Excel promotes transparency in finance by allowing more people to read the "source" (even the bankers). Cutely named forgotten programmes written in J were a more fecund source of problems.