[prodigal_erik]

"Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." Seeing a company get itself into severe trouble doesn't guarantee any particular effect on its share price, because the only connection between the two is investors' faith that some connection ought to exist. Shorts are betting not only when the price will drop but that no manipulation will occur at that time, and when a company is "too big to fail" and will attract government intervention it's exceptionally risky.

[MichaelApproved]

Very good point. You also may not have had the means to do it even if you had the knowledge. But how about at least show a post from 2007 or before that confirms you knew these clearly predictable events would happen.

My frustration is with someone claiming that they knew or that it was very predictable when they were simply WORRIED it would happen. Many of us worry about a lot of things. That doesn't mean when something finally goes wrong we get to say "see? I knew it would happen."

[Klinky]

You need to stop ignoring the massive amount of lies and fraud that was going on. Entire companies knew they were dealing with fraudulent/extremely risky transactions, yet no one wanted to be the one that stopped the buck. Not even ratings agencies, who's job it was to oversee the quality of these investments piped up when they knew that what they were rating as AAA was really garbage.

One example:

http://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-wall-street-emai...

That was about a 1.5 years before the $%$% really hit the fan. There are other e-mails floating around with investment brokers gloating about selling off "pieces of $%$@" to people. They knew what they were doing & profited handsomely from it, they have yet to really pay any price for it.

[MichaelApproved]

Where have i ignored that? It's not even part of this discussion.

I'm simply saying the original poster didn't know what he claims to have known. It's hindsight nonsense.

[Klinky]

You're claiming it wasn't "predictable", it was indeed predictable. Perhaps not on "main street", but the perpetrators(large chunk of wall street) knew what they were doing and didn't speak up about it because they were too busy profiting from it.