[smallerfish]

> far, far stupider than even the conspiracy theory

That was my big takeaway from reading a bunch of "insider" books after the 2008 crash. The banks thought they were getting away with an great scheme (not a conspiracy, per se), but had the common human inability to properly model out the logical chain of implications over the long term (and perhaps a touch of "emperor's clothes" preventing proper risk assessment within larger organizations). Meanwhile the market punters were caught up in a frothy bubble ("this time is truly different!") which clouded their perception of reality, which led to all kinds of bullshit hype in the media. There were outliers, of course (e.g. I rememeber an eye-opening article in Harper's in ~2006 which was extremely dire in its outlook, and of course there were various people who were fortunate with their shorts), but the folks bought into the alternate reality tended to ignore warnings, given that their money was invested in the fever dream (also perhaps trusting the authority of the banks to have put together a low risk product, without truly understanding it).

In short, there's no need to conjure up an illuminati when you have all of the various standard fallacies of human thinking to work with.

[giantrobot]

> In short, there's no need to conjure up an illuminati when you have all of the various standard fallacies of human thinking to work with.

You definitely don't need an Illuminati-esque mastermind when the participants in the system have similar goals, motivations, and capabilities. In retrospect an event might look coordinated but really it's just an aggregate of every participant acting entirely independently but according to similar constraints.