All Of A Sudden The Market Is

The Irish Turned In On Themselves And Bid Up Their Own Land Prices In The Most Extraordinary Ways... The Irish People Stepped In And Guaranteed The Banks, And Committed To Repay Sums They Can't Afford To Repay, And Essentially Committed Themselves To Generations Of Suffering.

The Inability To Envision A Certain Kind Of Person Doing A Certain Kind Of Thing Because You've Never Seen Someone Who Looks Like Him Do It Before Is Not Just A Vice. It's A Luxury. What Begins As A Failure Of The Imagination Ends As A Market Inefficiency: When You Rule Out An Entire Class Of People From Doing A Job Simply By Their Appearance, You Are Less Likely To Find The Best Person For The Job.

Why Isn't Someone Smarter Than Us Doing This?

Incredibly, At This Critical Juncture In Financial History, After Which So Much Changed So Quickly, The Only Constraint In The Subprime Mortgage Market Was A Shortage Of People Willing To Bet Against It.

The Germans Made Just About Every Bad Investment You Could Have Made In The Last 10 Years. They Invested In Icelandic Banks. They Invested In Greek Government Bonds. They Were Heavy Into Irish Banks, Big Into Irish Banks, And They Bought U.s. Subprime Mortgage Bonds.