Pickel does not include Munger’s colleague, Warren Buffett, among those who would ban derivatives, because it is a celebrated fact in the financial world that the man who sparked 1,370,000 Google citations for “financial weapons of mass destruction” has bought a good many of them for Berkshire Hathaway. Explaining, Buffett points out that as far back as 1998 he had told shareholders about derivatives Berkshire owned, and that he never said he wouldn’t again exploit a mispricing when he saw one in a derivative. (It is the opinion of this writer, a friend of both Buffett’s and Munger’s, that Buffett is incapable of ignoring mispricings, wherever in the financial markets they may exist.)

Congress, which has never shown talent for putting genies back into bottles—think of earmarks—once again has derivatives on the agenda. The last time Washington considered regulating them, in the late 1990s, things didn’t go too well. The champion of change then was the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born, who was determined to bring these exotic, unregulated instruments under the purview of her agency, which already oversaw futures trading—of puts and calls, for example. Still living in the Washington area today, she recently told the Washington Post that dire premonitions about derivatives back then caused her to wake repeatedly in a “cold sweat.”

It couldn’t have helped that in daylight she faced three men who were implacably opposed to regulation: Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers, and Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas). Not only did Born lose the battle, but Gramm pushed through legislation that specifically barred federal regulation of OTC derivatives.