Greg Lippmann had imagined the subprime mortgage market as a great financial tug-of-war: On one side pulled the Wall Street machine making the loans, packaging the bonds, and repackaging the worst of the bonds into CDOs and then, when they ran out of loans, creating fake ones out of thin air; on the other side, his noble army of short sellers betting against the loans. The optimists versus the pessimists. The fantasists versus the realists. The sellers of credit default swaps versus the buyers. The wrong versus the right. The metaphor was apt, up to a point: this point. Now the metaphor was
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