Risk Management Failure

The New York Times has a good article outlining the opposition to derivative regulation during the last couple of decades.  It's particularly damning to Alan Greenspan, and Robert Rubin, two avid proponents of not regulating derivatives.  For them and other free marketeers  derivatives had  dispersed risk among investors to a level that made the risk negligible.  Greenspan believed that derivatives were the ultimate hedge and used his stature to prevent derivative regulation on the grounds that doing so would damage the markets.  On the Oracle Greenspan's bidding, the Republican Congress legislatively blocked derivative regulation, and a lame duck President Clinton signed derivative deregulation into law.  High finance had solved the vexing problem of capitalism's cyclical credit crises.  

Events have revealed the extent of this hubris.  Irony has turned into tragedy.  The ultimate hedge spawned into viral risk spreading swiftly as the plague through the entwined parties and counterparties.  Now the best we can do is try to stanch the mortality rate while madly searching for a cure.  Take up the bodies.