Michael Lewis

mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago

This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage their own.

ut then I read the news that a little-known New York hedge fund manager named John Paulson had made $20 billion or so for his investors and nearly $4 billion for himself. This was more money than anyone had ever made so quickly on Wall Street. Moreover, he had done it by betting against the very subprime mortgage bonds now sinking Citigroup and every other big Wall Street investment bank