Joel Spolsky, or maybe Steve Yegge (or maybe both), wrote an article once about how you should always understand your business at a level of abstraction lower t

Joel Spolsky, or maybe Steve Yegge (or maybe both), wrote an article once about how you should always understand your business at a level of abstraction lower than what you actually deal in. If you write in C, know what a C compiler does. If you sell clothes, know something about your distributors. And so on. Does anyone else think this may have all been avoided if investors had followed that rule? If you trade C.D.O.s, know what they're made of; if you trade mortgages, know who they're sold to? Or maybe nobody knew this because it was deliberately hidden. I'm just assuming that on this vast a scale, it's more likely incompetence than corruption.