Goldman in 1720
Credit default swaps are not new, so the oft-repeated claim that today's financial crimes are too complex to regulate is pure ratshit.

From The etymological compendium by William Pulleyn, written in 1830:

The word Bear, applied to a certain class on the Stock Exchange, signifies one who insures a real value upon an imaginary thing, and who is said to sell a Bear, which is the same thing as a promise among courtiers, or a vow between lovers.

The party called a Bull is the opposite contracting party. It takes its origin merely from the circumstance, that the Bear being a voracious animal generally sacrifices the Bull when an opportunity presents itself.

These terms arose in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and continue in our modern bubbles, always following the same model and always guaranteed to find a sufficient number of uninformed Bulls to sacrifice.

Swift gives a similar definition, adding the origin of the mammalian metaphor: "He who sells that of which he is not possessed is proverbially said to sell the skin before he has caught the bear."

After the South Sea Bubble popped, the British gov't acted fast and hard. All the financiers were arrested along with many members of Parliament who deregulated to enable the bubble. All their property was confiscated and the whole economic structure of Britain was rebuilt on a more solid foundation.

It wasn't too complicated for Britain to fix then, so today's version can't be too complicated for Britain and America to fix now.

Of course the problem isn't complexity, it's complicity. Total 100.00% corruption of ALL governmental and religious and corporate and educational and cultural institutions. No honest men have been allowed to get anywhere near the centers of power for several decades, so there is no danger of even the tiniest nanosliver of regulation interfering with the Ultimate Omnipotence Of Goldman Sachs, Lord of Lords and God of Gods.

= = = = =

This now completes a remarkable pattern. The murderous mutant Martians who occupy the seats of power in the English-speaking world always cry Unprecedented! Unexpected! Never Happened Before! to justify their treason.

War? Unprecedented! Must lose! Terrorism? Unprecedented! Must give terrorists Royal Privileges, must disarm and demoralize non-terrorists! Trade wars by mercantilist China? Unprecedented! Must surrender unconditionally! Pirates? Unprecedented! Never heard of pirates before! Must prevent ships from arming their crews! Droughts and floods? Unprecedented! Must prohibit breathing! Stock bubbles? Credit Default Swaps? Unprecedented! Too complicated to understand! Must donate entire economy, plus an extra quadrillion of made-up money, to Goldman Sachs!

All of these situations have happened before. More importantly, all of these problems have been solved before. And not just in Biblical or Roman times when records could be inaccurate and analogies hard to draw. No, all of these events have been fixed in the modern era, well within the institutional memories of existing newspapers and universities. Most of them were faced and fixed by FDR, who is still within living memory for the older generation.

Why do these modern mutant mafiosi get away with such idiocy, when so many people know the truth? Well, that's easy enough to answer. They have carefully excluded all truth-knowers from positions of power in the government and media, and anyone who tries to speak the truth is quickly crazified, quickly finds himself without a career and a reputation. All "fair and balanced debate" involves the Big-Endians vs the Little-Endians; if you think the problem is not in the egg, you're Crazy.

But why do they want to sound like goddamn retards? I still can't answer that one.
  ¶ 5:54 AM