Oh no. It is clear enough. It is just wrong.
When a bunch of guys and galz make collectively $100B's in bonuses over two decades pushing toxic paper into various portfolios and it turns out that the underlying debt cannot be repaid, I don't need to follow the pea under the derivatives shell to figure out who the crooks are. It is the oldest question in under the sun.
Cui bono?
Those are the fat cats that need to be strung up.
My only question is, why are you trying to defend them and what is the basis for the defense? I will take the former as self-evident, but you can defend yourself if you want. As to the latter, that they didn't know what they were doing when the stuck the public with the fallout is laughable. Michael Milken -remember him because he started it all - wrote papers at Wharton describing exactly how to do it, and that is what he did. He went to jail for other things, but not the chief fraud he perpetrated - making the FED bail the banks out for excessive debt expansion. So don't try this innocent they didn't know what they were doing nonsense.
But the fact is I think it's a fair question if it were being present by someone with a more open mind so on the assumption that such a fair minded person might be reading this I'll tell you.
I've been on Wall Street for nearly 20 years. I started out on the exotic swaps desk at JP Morgan, but I didn't like it so I switched to the energy desk working with commodity derivatives. From there I bounced around a little and ended up as head of quantitative analysis for a 10 billion plus hedge fund. After a decade or so at different three hedge funds, I ended up a portfolio manager running a quantitative equity strategy for another major hedge fund.
I've spent my entire career with the people involved in this crisis. There are some real jerks in the industry, but the vast majority of the people I've met were good, decent, thoughtful people just like anyone else. All any of them were trying to do was to make a good living to take care of their kids, and have enough left cover at the end to retire in comfort. The didn't want handouts.. .they worked harder than any industry I know doing work that few people know how to do. They are real humans to me, not some cartoon character from the mind of someone who see's a conspiracy behind every tree.
What's more, I know what motivated them... and I know what they were thinking at almost every point in this process. And the picture that people like you paint of what went on is so distorted and so far from reality that I think it's unfair to represent it that way.
Since it's obvious that your viewpoint comes mainly from ignorance rather than malice, I was hoping that shedding a little light on the subject might help things be depicted more accurately. But I guess there is no convincing some people.
All the same though I wanted to tear away the cartoon that people with your view have been painting and replace it with something more accurate. Just because it's the right thing to do.