[jimbokun]

If McDonald's somehow misrepresents what's in their double quarter pounder with cheese, yes, they will probably get sued. I suppose that you could argue that McDonald's customers should perform a chemical analysis of their meal before eating it, so they really know what's in it. But I do not think that is the standard that the law applies.

Can we apply this metaphor to the Goldman mortgage backed securities? Well, how many mortgages were wrapped up in those securities? Was there anyway to be sure what the security would be worth under various scenarios? I saw an article that Python was being considered as a language for specifying derivatives, so you could just run the program and know what the payouts would be under various scenarios with no ambiguity. Was there an expectation that Goldman was doing the work of picking securities with a certain risk profile, when in actuality they were picking securities with a higher risk profile?

It seems to me that a general principle of the law should be that a seller who intentionally misrepresents what they are selling has some measure of liability. Do you disagree, or do you feel that no misrepresentation occurred in this case?