Semantics

The cynic in me understands the sarcasm here, but I think a lot of people would look at this remark as a second- or even third-order misapprehension of what Rubin is saying. For one, Rubin didn't say "nobody could have predicted", he said that "nobody was prepared", which is a completely different thing. It's not that none of these tools couldn't predict that gravity works, it's just that they count on being exempt from most laws, physical and otherwise. That is, after all, what they rent politicians for.

Then there's this:

If the idea is just that you make money while the market goes up, and then when the market goes down the government steps in to rescue you, probably a lot of people could do the job.

Yes. That's exactly the idea. This is a business utterly without ethics, completely unencumbered by basic morals or the usual definitions of merit. Hell, this a business where loan bundlers and wholesalers were showing up in low-cut blouses and offering blowjobs to underwriters in order to move product everyone knew was bad. Was anybody unclear on this?

Lot of stories lately on how the outsourcing of food and food processing has become a real health risk for us, what with the melamine and all apparently used as a primary ingredient in your average Chinese food processing plant. This financial burger we're all being forced to take a bite out of was made from cattle fed on melamine and bone meal, soaked in antifreeze, breaded in asbestos dust, and left out in the sun for the weekend.

It's not that Rubin and his lackeys had no clue about any of this. It's that the smells of free money, decent coke, and easy pussy will do that to you after a certain number of years. They've been given no reason not to continue to do so.