The "smartest people in the world" who somehow misjudged the housing market so badly that they plunged our country into a depression. Yes, those "smartest people" indeed.
They made a ton of money up to the top of that bubble, then they got to discreetly dump all of their bad investments on us taxpayers so they wouldn't have to feel the losses. And that very year, they paid themselves the biggest bonuses in history. If that isn't smart, I don't know what is.
Remember the justification for the emergency bailout? "Too big to fail". So certainly since then we've broken up those Wall Street companies that were too big to fail, right? No, we helped them get even bigger.
Certainly many of the architects of that crash went to jail, right? None of them went to jail. Certainly, they lost their jobs as the heads of their Wall Street empires? Almost none of them lost their jobs (just one that I know of). Etc.
Wall Street dumb for "letting" AAPL fall? They get paid their commissions as we buy any stock and they get paid their commissions AGAIN as we sell any stock. Whether we win on a trade or lose on a trade, they also get theirs.
Their institutional arms rides the bull on the way up (and profits handsomely) and then shorts it for just as much profit on the way down. It matters little to them whether it's rising or falling... they just want it moving because movements drive profits plus commissions.
They don't have to manufacture anything (but smoke & spin) and yet they find ways to squeeze themselves into every other company's transactions (via credit) so that they get a little share of just about every-single transaction we make. All of them. Everything. Pay for a dollar menu burger with credit or debit and Wall Street will get a little piece of that transaction.
They also motivate our leadership in Washington to take us all deeper and deeper into debt. Why? Because there's so much interest/fees/etc in "financing the debt" and "raising the debt ceiling". They even motivate that same leadership to take our tax dollars, loan that money to Wall Street at dirt cheap (slightly over 0% right now) so that Wall Street can then loan us taxpayers our own money and charge us 3% or more. It's our money being loaned to us but it's free profit for them.
Lastly, there was once a time when the reason to put our money in a bank was to keep the thieves from stealing it. It was much more secure in the bank. Now the banks- through ever-evolving nickel & diming fees- get to reach right into our own accounts and take fees without even alerting us before they do so. We usually find out after they've taken the money. Does that kind of thief go to jail? Not at all. It's just "good business"
And don't even get me started about the enormous well of hidden fees taken from our 401Ks, mutual fund investments, etc. If there was ever a law that would force full disclosure of all fees taken from the masses by the banks, there would probably be riots & revolution.
We're the dumb ones. We can only profit on AAPL by first paying Wall Street to allow us to buy some of those shares and then we can only profit if it moves one way. We're too dumb to put in stops or to short to make money on the way down too because we would rather cling to "long term", "this makes no sense" and similar hope-based trading. I wish I could get the world to give me a nickel for every time "hope" was used to justify sticking with a falling stock.
Yes, I'd say they're the smartest guys in the world. I don't like it one bit. But facts is facts.