Perhaps the only greater threat is the risks we think we have a handle on, but don’t.* In these cases we not only fool ourselves, but our false confidence may be contagious. In the case of the ratings agencies, it helped to infect the entire financial system. “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.
