[arethuza]

That's the surprising thing I took away from reading quite a lot about the financial crisis - most of the trading makes perfect sense, and seems quite reasonable, when looked at in isolation.

In "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense" there is a description of trading in distressed corporate bonds - I always wondered how you actually make money in bond markets and this was an interesting (to me) example of a scenario where what they were doing was obviously profitable and useful.