Quiggin on Tett

I have a review of Gilliam Tett’s Fool’s Gold forthcoming in The American Prospect, but John Quiggin has scooped me by also noticing something in Tett’s narrative that Tett herself seems to underplay or perhaps somehow miss. Namely the extent to which the financial instruments that she describes as having been misused or gone bad sometime after their invention were really rotten from the beginning. She lays the facts out quite clearly herself—the whole thing was always a house of cards, it just happens to be the case that the people at JP Morgan who invented the stuff didn’t build nearly as high a tower as some of their imitators.