Is Another Family Office Blowing Up?

Excuse me for being lazy, but wasn't the Archegos blow up due to the kind of crap that was what got the whole system in a funk back in 2008? Derivatives of derivatives with no actual underpinning of actual equity? And who made this off-the-books action possible? Was it like JMP, GS, and the now defunct Lehman Brothers and another whose name I can't recall that went down (taking one for the team). More synthetic crap traded out of any formal exchange, having no substance, no records, no accounting. For a while making the risk takers money by the ton, backed up by the WS named banks (who should have known better, but went along since it was off the books and out of sight and profitable for a while). CDO's and CDS's and what not, all on a bar napkin and filed in a drawer.

You'd think they would have learned their lessons. You'd be wrong. Since they were Too Big To Fail (TBTF), presented a "systemic risk of failure of our whole banking system," what could we do but to bail them all out at the expense, and from the purse, of taxpayers?

An old school admonition is "Do NOT reward bad behavior." Something that has been lost on recent generations of parents and regulators. So, here we are again. More bad behavior, more off-the-books synthetic gimmicks, and the predictable bad consequences.

Archegos's practices were risky, but the big banks made it possible, and now they all pretend they had no idea. Whoopsie! Well, they'll never do that again...until the next time.