It's the Economy, Dummkopf!

Extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets. During the boom years a wildly disproportionate number of those idiots were in Germany. As a reporter for Bloomberg News in Frankfurt, named Aaron Kirchfeld, put it to me, "You'd talk to a New York investment banker, and they'd say, ‘No one is going to buy this crap. Oh. Wait. The Landesbanks will!'"

When Morgan Stanley designed extremely complicated credit-default swaps all but certain to fail so that their own proprietary traders could bet against them, the main buyers were German. When Goldman Sachs helped the New York hedge-fund manager John Paulson design a bond to bet against--a bond that Paulson hoped would fail--the buyer on the other side was a German bank called IKB. IKB, along with another famous fool at the Wall Street poker table called WestLB, is based in Düsseldorf--which is why, when you asked a smart Wall Street bond trader who was buying all this crap during the boom, he might well say, simply, "Stupid Germans in Düsseldorf."