The wall street corruption as a loop

Great article, the end of wall street's boom. It is a little long but reads really well. Basically this guy puts the root cause of the current mess at banks going public. From the comments, a program for why Wall Street went kookoo.

Comments mine.

Posted: Nov 11 2008 11:05pm ET
I imagine the code review went like this:

"Hey wait, that function never returns -- it's infinitely recursive!"
"Yes, but we get a payout on each recursion"
"...How soon can you get it into production?"

void createCommissions( shittyLoans )
{
commissions = 0.0

// Shitty loans get securitized as CDO
cdo = BulgeBracketFirm.formatAsCDO( shittyLoans )

// Ratings get assigned to the securitized debt, AAA
aaaDebt = RatingsAgency.formatAAA( cdo )

// Wall Street makes money selling debt to investors
commissions += BulgeBracketFirm.Sell( aaaDebt, bulls)

// Hedge the CDO with a Swap.
cds = BulgeBracketFirm.createDefaultSwap( cdo )

// There is two sides to the trade, notice that is never the Firm
longSide = cds.getLongSide()
shortSide = cds.getShortSide()

// Cash was coming in from selling the short side of the Swap
commissions += BulgeBracketFirm.sell( shortSide, bears)

BulgeBracketFirm.payBonuses(commissions)

// The long side was crap loans, so rinse and repeat?
return createCommissions( longSide )
}