United States of Ponzi

This is almost like this.

So how can we displace a fraud?, ask Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pablo Triana:

Not by preaching nor by rational argument (believe us, we tried). Not by evidence. Risk methods that failed dramatically in the real world continue to be taught to students in business schools, where professors never lose tenure for the misapplications of those methods. As we are writing these lines, close to 100,000 MBAs are still learning portfolio theory – it is uniformly on the programme for next semester. An airline company would ground the aircraft and investigate after the crash – universities would put more aircraft in the skies, crash after crash. The fraud can be displaced only by shaming people, by boycotting the orthodox financial economics establishment and the institutions that allowed this to happen.

See also Michael Lewis on The End:

Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?