When he began to grasp, along with the rest of the world, what big American firms had done—rigged credit ratings to make bad loans seem like good loans, created subprime bonds designed to fail, sold them to their customers and then bet against them, and so on—his mind hit some kind of wall. For the first time in his career, he felt that he could only win if someone else lost, or, more likely, that someone else could only win if he lost. He was not by nature a zero-sum person, but he had somehow wound up in the middle of a zero-sum business. His body had always tended to register stress before
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