Some of the Treasury staff became increasingly nervous about performance, regarding the auction design process as a "science experiment" run amok: market designers had always insisted that the performance of the auctions was sensitive to even seemingly minor changes in rules, and yet they could not even agree about how rule changes would affect performance. They wanted to implement both of the alternative auction forms and use the first set of auctions as trial runs, a prospect that surely failed to inspire confidence. And this in the midst of a collapsing world economy.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 859