David Frum: How Wall Street laughed its way through the meltdown

"Wall Street’s self-infatuated “smart money” went long on subprime America. For a brief moment, it looked as if the “smart money” would suffer the fate of “dumb money” – but no … the so-called smart money proved to be genuinely “smart money” after all, thanks to its canny investments in political influence. It is the US Treasury that becomes the ultimate “dumb money,” absorbing Wall Street’s losses because the very scale of the Wall Street disaster denied the Treasury any other choice"