Subprime mortgages: you wreak what you sow

The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: for years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks, betting borrowed billions on dubious mortgage derivatives, and eventually the odds caught up with them.But behind that simple truth is a more surprising one: the financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that’s what they were paid to do. (The New Yorker)

If the measure of performance/success is quantitative, can we expect anything else?

“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The very definition of insanity.