Actually CDOs were fine so long as you stuck to the right ones. I mean, they were by definition always junk, but you were sort of okay if you went with the good junk rather than the ones they made later when the demand was so high they thought it would be clever to create junk-junk and label it triple-A, and when everyone and his aunt decided to borrow ten million dollars against a fucking shack in the Everglades. Use your head: no idea that proposes free money is ever a good idea, because money is mathematics and mathematics does not allow you to add something to one side of the equation without balancing it on the other—but they weren’t originally the hell-fest of financial immolation they turned into down the line. Finance by itself is ruthless, and that ruthlessness is its salvation. The real disasters are only possible when you bring politics into it, because politics is about pretending to care.