I think at AIG and at some of these investment banks, there were people who were doing these securitizations who knew that ultimately they were going to blow up, and they didn’t care. They didn’t care because the structure of compensation at a place like AIG and certainly at the investment banks leads people to take a future-discounting model, that’s what I’d call it. There’s this year’s compensation period…and then there’s the future. And the future is very heavily discounted. And many of these risks, like the risk of an economic shock grave enough to cause these brittle subprime securitizations to break, was something you wouldn’t expect to happen every year, it would take a couple of years, and because people were paid according to mark-to-market profits in a given year, they continued to do this business even though they knew that it was storing up risks for an eventual meltdown. That’s true of AIG and that’s true of the investment banks.
kind of a funny way to put it (discounting the future). reminds me of that scene in the pale king where DFW fails the final because of the compounding effect of not studying (depreciation schedules)