I am so tired of hearing about "confounding financial products that no one can hope to understand".<p>An intelligent person willing to spend a few hours would have no trouble gaining a basic understanding of CDOs, credit default swaps, and the like.<p>There's no excuse for that kind of thing in mainstream journalism (where you often see it), and I'm kind of surprised that you hear it from Jason.
I'm not a big fan of GS, or the current finance setup. That being said:<p>"These bastards are reveling in their financial mischievousness – they’re enjoying explaining exactly how they fucked us."<p>If you go up against people who are smarter than you, and greedier than you, and who know more than you, and you trust them not to fuck you, they will fuck you.<p>That's capitalism.
Unfortunately like many others Jason is mis-informed about what was really behind this crisis. Let's not forget that the Federal Reserve has been maintaining exceptionally low interest rates for much of the last 10 years, with a few exceptions, and that both previous presidents cheered the rapid increase in home ownership rates seen in the early parts of the new millennium.
Don't expect things to change any time soon. The problem is systemic, on a global level. This is not just GS; they only happen to play the market better than most.<p>Banks have an incentive to take on greater levels of risk in order to attract deposits (which are a highly liquid, short-term source of capital); hence, investors must find a way to out-do the bank returns in order to justify their existence.<p>People can point to specific flaws within the system (of which there are many), but we live in a global economy with many banks competing for profits. Given that the possibility of eliminating greed is near zero, this really is a catch-22.<p>Global regulation (<i>see the Basel Accords</i>) would result in significantly diminished economic growth, but is the only viable "solution" (you can begin to see how Marx justified communism).<p>Result: the global banking system tends not to incentivise long-term investment, which then leads to asset bubbles. While we can not prevent bubbles all together, regulatory regimes can help to make them less frequent.