Alan Greenspan and Roy Blount Jr.

Thursday, I offered a few thoughts on Alan Greenspan's mea culpa before Congress, in which he acknowledged that he was mistaken in thinking that derivatives didn't need any regulation. I expanded on the subject in the Guardian, and finished with this from the quotable Roy Blount Jr.:

One doesn't need a Nobel prize to know what brought about the collapse of this intellectual edifice. Humorist Roy Blount summed it up in a talk before an audience in Philadelphia earlier this week: "Money got too abstract, and that's why it went away".