Risky Business: Investors and Hindsight

(Smart Money) — When the Deepwater Horizon rig sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, something remarkable happened: Millions of Americans became retrospective experts on deepwater oil exploration. Of course, an accident like this was just around the corner. Of course it couldn’t be fixed with a containment dome (those darn frozen hydrocarbons). Of course a “top kill” and a “junk shot” were doomed to fail! Golf balls? Golf balls!? And when the spill is eventually sealed off with an underground nuclear explosion, and when that (inevitably) wakes Godzilla, who proceeds to demolish what’s left of New Orleans before heading up the Mississippi River to spawn, no doubt there will be one man, one working-class hero standing atop a stack of nuclear-lizard eggs, turning to the newly minted radiological expert next to him, holding forth on how he just knew something like this was bound to happen.