"– that state of intense puzzlement in which we find ourselves when our certainties fall to pieces; when suddenly we get caught in an impasse, at a loss to explain what our eyes can see, our fingers can touch, our ears can hear. At those rare moments, as our reason valiantly struggles to fathom what the senses are reporting, our aporia humbles us and readies the prepared mind for previously unbearable truths. And when the aporia casts its net far and wide to ensnare the whole of humanity, we know we are at a very special moment in history. September 2008 was just such a moment. "
--Varoufakis, Yanis. The Global Minotaur (p. 1). Zed Books.
2008 may have been the 'Aporia' for those who assumed that giving subprime McMansion loans to illegal aliens would continue forever. Or that Bear Stearns, Fannie, Freddy, AIG, WaMu all failing within the span of a few months, were just totally random uncorrelated events.
However, to Wall Street it was The Big Short. Literally. For some firms, the biggest one ever. And Goldman Sachs is still reaping the rewards today.
Wall Street's Aporia has yet to be realized:
The truth is that 2008 was an 'inconvenient' moment when the Idiocracy was forced to remove its head from its ass. Looking around, they didn't like what they saw, and immediately reinserted it where it belongs. Whereas, Wall Street saw it all the way and invented the 'synthetic CDO' to fully monetize the occasion. This time, not so much.
