There were some excellent shows on recently. One was a documentary on PBS about the fall of Bear Sterns and then ended like an biography about Hank Paulson. It was astounding how much the personalities of the key players involved effected the outcome of the financial mess.

Then last night I watched a special on CNBC that went into a lot of depth about many of the different investment vehicles. Basically the take home was that few people understood the underlying implications of all these esoteric ways of investing in the mortgage market. Even Alan Greenspan admitted that despite a strong mathematical upbringing and access to over 100 PhD's on a daily basis, he understood little about what was going on.

It didn't take much for smart people with less than stellar integrity to game the system.