from Hacker News

Series of bizarre deaths in the financial world this week

by jasey on 2/1/14, 4:09 AM with 23 comments

• by tptacek on 2/1/14, 5:12 AM

  * Chief Economist at Russell, suicide, after problems at work

  * A retired Deutche risk manager, suicide

  * An MD at Tata Motors, suicide

  * An IT manager at JPMC in London, apparent suicide

  * An unnamed marketing professional at Swiss Re, cause unknown

  This is more like numerology than a "series of deaths in the financial world". The "financial world" employs many hundreds of thousands of people. especially when generalized to include commercial, retail, and investment banks, asset management firms, the entire insurance industry, hedge funds, market data firms, and analysts. Also, apparently, the automotive industry.

  Moreover, these are people with wildly different jobs and levels of seniority.

  You can probably generate similar patterns every year, if you look carefully and track, say, IT executives and marketing managers alongside the Chief Economists. If you Google some of the names in this article, you'll see that the news coverage for them frequently does exactly that.

  This seems pretty silly. What am I missing?

• by joe_the_user on 2/1/14, 5:14 AM

  What would be useful would be a tool to determine how really unusual is some series of events X. Obviously, you'd have to keep in mind that every day some number of "highly unlikely" events occurs [1].

  Not to dismiss this series of bizarre death but rather, just feeling frustrated that I can say neither "Woah, something's going on" nor "nothing to see here folks, move along".

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

• by bertil on 2/1/14, 5:22 AM

  Since 2007, most bankers have described their situation as significantly more worrying and stressful. I’m estimating the number of senior executives in that industry at 50,000 people. Suicide rate for stressed 50-somethings is around 15 per 100,000. That means on average one every three weeks.

  That would make a week with seven deaths seem suspicious, but let's consider the Bernouilli distribution, considering there has been roughly 700 weeks since 2007: ( (1-( 1-(15/100000/52))^50000 * (15/100000/52))^7 ) ^700 )

  Yeah, that's unlikely.

• by jjoe on 2/1/14, 5:12 AM

  Was just now researching this (procrast:on). Here's an incomplete list:

  1) Tata's managing director Karl Slym

  2) Swiss Re's Tim Dickenson communications director

  3) Russell Investments’ chief economist Mike Dueker

  4) Deutsche Bank's William Broeksmit to become chief risk officer (didn't materialize)

  5) Zurich Insurance Group's finance chief Pierre Wauthier

• by confluence on 2/1/14, 6:59 AM

  More like a bunch of people died in a bunch of different jobs this week, so lets make some faulty correlations on a small sample size.

• by john2x on 2/1/14, 5:00 AM

  Sounds very much like in a movie. Very eerie.

• by sneak on 2/1/14, 5:45 AM

  If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything...