Bad apple

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Bad apple
/bæd ˈæpl/ (n.)
One of those mischievous human imps occupying unobserved crevices in the great steampunk machine who, by their human frailty, ruin the best-laid plans of the machines.

On the conventional wisdom, bad apples are the remaining fly in the ointment between us and the sunlit uplands of financial services utopia. Once the last one can be removed all will be well in perpetuity.

The JC wonders whether we should be quite so surprised. Bad apples gonna be bad. They will always find and exploit zero-day flaws in the system, which is what we should expect bad apples to do. These they will find them exactly where the system least expects them to be found, and is therefore not looking: apparently harmless, sleepy backwaters. LIBOR submissions. The accounting department. The Delta-one index swaps desk. In a family office.

But who the bad apples are depends on who is asking, and, critically, when.

Often, the people who look like heroes — NASDAQ chairmen, visionary innovators, star traders —before the fact only start to look like bad apples after it. And vice versa.

Before and after fact: a play in two acts

Quiz time: taking the information supplied about who everyone thought was the hero, or bad apple, before a celebrated financial markets catastrophe, fill in who you think it might have turned out to be after the event.

The JC’s famous “guess the bad apple”™ game

Incident	Before		After
	Hero	Bad Apple	Hero	Bad Apple
Enron	Jeff Skilling Ken Lay Andrew Fastow	Fortune Journalist Bethany MacLean Short-seller Jim Chanos	_______	_______
Madoff	Bernie Madoff Fairfield Sentry The SEC	Option Trader Harry Markopolos Barron’s Journalist Erin Arvedlund	_______	_______
Barings	Nick Leeson Peter “not terribly difficult” Baring	Er...	_______	_______
Archegos	Bill Huang Co-heads of PB, everywhere	Junior credit officer	_______	_______
FTX	Sam Bankman-Fried Caroline Ellison	Matt (So it’s a ponzi scheme?) Levine	_______	_______
WireCard	Markus Braun Jan Marsalek BaFin	FT Journalist Dan McCrum Internal lawyer Pav Gill Short-seller Matthew Earl	_______	_______

The JC’s view: the “bad apple” concept is not a good one if the virtue of one’s applehood is only apparent in hindsight.

See also

• Human error
• Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations
• Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated