I’ve figured out why these people are — to steal Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s great phrase — Intellectuals Yet Idiots.

They are economists. Or at least one of them is. Not sure if both.

But if you are professional economist to keep a job you nearly have to lobotomize yourself. You simply must be an IYI to maintain your salary.

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

That describes the duo on that site perfectly.

Mystery solved. IYIs, and the worst sort of IYIs: economists!

Anyone reading this lived through the greatest fraud in human history.

Financial writer David Dayen goes beyond documenting the systemic fraud perpetrated by Wall Street. He shows how ordinary people were able to blow the lid off the mortgage machine and document the lack of evidence for finance’s claims they owned the debts that they claimed to own. Those claims, in turn, forced the government to cover up the fraud in order to preserve the myth of the market.

It amazes me every time I think about this, about what happened. This is fraud on an unparalleled scale — endorsed and then furthered by the US government — that affected directly millions of people and billions indirectly. It obviously occurred, but I just can’t wrap my mind around it and that it was allowed to occur.

Millions of titles out there are basically complete fabrications. Not only that, but this fraud is now the official way of doing business.

Don’t know why there was not more of an uproar about it, but I think the details are just a little too abstruse with too many monied interests controlling the propaganda fountain and the courts/legislatures for any real pushback to materialize.