No, but seriously, here’s the thing: the CDO was actually a laudable idea in the beginning, for a given value of the word. They took the advantages of large borrowers and shared them among small borrowers who otherwise wouldn’t get terms they could afford by clubbing them all together, and they parcelled out the risk of default along with possibility of profit. The key was choosing the right people to lend to, customers who were smart and could pay back but who for whatever reason weren’t getting approved for normal loans. The honest salt-of-the-earth poor for whom the better rate they could get through loans financed by CDOs meant the difference between affordability and impossibility.