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Re:Obama to eliminate all cap gains taxes for VCs and entrep... by logjam on Friday October 10, 2008 @08:20PM (#329388)
You've got to be kidding. Please explain how these "models" informed the ethics of what remains basically a shell game. What you mean to say is the "models" provided cover...rationalization for wild speculation and accounting tricks with other people's money, sans almost any equity.

"Models" have nothing to do with regulation, or with the lack of ethics that has brought us to this point, other than the curious coincidence that these "models" supported and aligned so well with unbridled greed.

Re:Obama to eliminate all cap gains taxes for VCs and entrep... by orib on Saturday October 11, 2008 @02:01PM (#329823)
What if people honestly believed that they were actually going to make money if they shuffled things around in the way that they did? What if they thought that the risks from the bad loans were acceptable because of bad simplifications in their models? What if this is explainable by stupidity and not malice?

People are stupid, but they're not (usually) deliberately self-destructive.