Evil Annoying Idiot Fucks

I disagree with this headline:

The villains of the financial catastrophe aren't criminals. They're morons.

I do not think that the terms are mutually exclusive. When it comes to petty crooks the two often go hand-in-hand so I don't think it's an excuse for the big-time boys either.

In the past few months, we've been riveted and disgusted by the exploits of scamsters like Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford (characters who, if they didn't exist, would have to be invented by Tom Wolfe). It's both easy and convenient to hold them up as the ultimate symbols of the just-ended boom. But we shouldn't. While there was some crime in the mortgage industry, law-abiding, respectable, upstanding citizens caused the overwhelming majority of financial losses suffered thus far. Skeezy money managers and mobbed-up boiler rooms didn't create the economic catastrophe. It was visited on us by firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500—companies that trace their origins back to the 1800s, run by graduates of Yale and Harvard. The people who blew up the system weren't anarchists. They were members of the club: central bankers and private-equity honchos, hedge-fund geniuses and Ph.D. economists, CEOs and investment bankers. And the (overwhelmingly legal) con they perpetuated on themselves, their colleagues, their shareholders and creditors, and, ultimately, on us taxpayers makes Madoff's sins look like child's play.

No fucking shit. It was mostly "legal" because these father-rapers wrote the fucking laws. Daniel Gross is damn right that Madoff and Stanford were small potatoes compared to the "respectable" pig-analinguists in "legitimate" government and business. But their stupidity should not prevent them from going up against the wall as well. If a hairy paranoid mountain man had this massive leveraged debt based economy bullshit figured out several years ago, then we should not accept that their mere stupidity is enough to explain their destructive actions. If they're really so stupid, why are they walking away with their pockets full while the taxpayers pick up the tab?