As long as it can be shown that risks could have been better managed—by diversification, better models, better rules, better institutions, better professionals—the loss is morally justified. The retrospective argument that risk could have been better managed becomes the moral justification for the losses of everyone involved . . . the risk management discourse enables us to simultaneously celebrate the indeterminacy of outcomes and to retrospectively moralize these outcomes; to deny a singular causality before an outcome materializes and to attribute a moral causality after an outcome materializes.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 342