And how the piranhas profited from our misery.

More from Tack;

"Just my opinion, of course, but I think the powertraders on Wall Street look for weaknesses to exploit in the name of profit, without regard to economic consequences, political motives, nationalistic allegiances and/or world conspiracies. To them, Wall Street is just a Golden Goose that keeps producing.In the instance at hand, it became apparent that if mark-to-market accounting of large asset bases could be linked, more or less directly, to the ability to decimate the market value of thinly-traded debt assets, then, the balance sheets of huge institutions and their related share prices could be brought into play. Hence, we saw the ABX index created by Goldman Sachs for the specific purpose of having a vehicle to short subprime debt paper. As must have been the traders' fondest hopes, the ABX, and other debt indices, became the de-facto standard for valuing corporate debt on a broad basis, so that these thinly-traded indices could serve as the value benchmark for vast quantities of debt assets, without regard to other performance and valuation methods. Once, that occurred, the rout was on, and it was totally self-reinforcing, as declining index values lowered debt-asset values, causing huge writedowns on corporate books, creating panic share selloffs, which in turn created more fear, allowing the indices to be shorted even lower, rather easily.You raise the question of whether these factions desired or were indifferent to the final destruction of the financial system, and I'd probably conjecture that while they don't mind making the Golden Goose very ill, they don't really want to kill it, since they can make money making it healthy once again, until the next time they want to strangle it for a while.To that end, once all the damage was done shorting things to near calamity, the same interests that had made tens or hundreds of billions probably hoped to pick up all the decimated paper for a song, if banks could be forced to sell it at vastly depressed prices. That's why so much pressure has been brought to bear on forcing banks to give away 'toxic" paper. However, seeing that this approach was not bearing fruit, and looked increasingly likely not to occur, the speculators did the next best thing, they started buying large positions in the entities holding such paper, so they could participate in the inevitable ride up. "If you can't beat 'em. join 'em."

I add that the piranhas had a motive in crashing the financial system.