It is politically unacceptable to make banks… The crisis was a textbook case of looting. The major firms are now more powerful by virtue of being bigger and fewer, and official denials to the contrary, are in a better position to loot than before.
If you know we’ve crashed, you don’t know who did it.
In the stone ages of investment banking, when firms were partnerships, it would have been unheard of to take on a lot of moderately long-dated, risky, illiquid, bespoke, hard to value assets and fund them in short term where they’d be exposed to rollover risks.
Go ahead. Be curious. You can meet the Devil on the path but you don’t have to shake his hand.