An Interesting Comment on our Current Woes

This comment by a reader responding to an article in Reuters struck a chord with me:

In today’s world with information so widely available, people who are paying attention have the opportunity to identify the latest cheap trick and ride on its coat-tails. (credit default swaps, phony ratings on securitized debts, etc.) This accounts in large part for the catastrophic financial meltdown that we re now seeing.

You could say it's greed that drives the willingness to invest in these (in fact) risky asset classes. But that may be oversimplification. It is actually a kind of corrupting influence that rapidly spreads through any population of participants when after a period of refusing to be involved in cheap tricks, they finally succumb, seeing that all these morons are making a fortune. Then professionalism, integrity, good judgment, and plain common sense fly out the window.
(My italics)
This is the underpinning of every speculative bubble. Corruption of the system by individuals who once thought of themselves as professionals of the highest integrity. They learn to talk themselves out of their ethics in order to stay in the game. This is the most destructive form of careerism and when it pervades industry as it does now, society is in for a correction that will take at least a generation.

I think he makes a very good point.