I couldn’t help but feel a little smug throughout 2008 when I read the reports of hysterical investment bankers as they tried to convince federal regulators to clamp down on short selling.
The real estate market had finally crashed with a vengeance and the banks were left holding far too many derivatives based on sub-prime mortgages, particularly at  Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, the weakest of the big five Wall Street firms, none of which survived the year.
After a while, it became predictable, their pleas for intervention.
The short sellers, who made big bets that the firms’ stock prices would continue to fall, had pounced. This, in turn, drove the banks’ stock prices still lower, hastening their demise. The CEOs all railed against speculative trading -- a job they had been happy to perform for their clients until their firms had become the subject of speculation.
Served them right, I thought at the time. Let them taste the consequences of their reckless trading. They had helped create the very environment that would do them in. But for all my condescension, I knew that I would still pay for it, in the end, through government intervention.
It's the story playing out in Europe these days, as Greece's fragile economy threatens to crash. But it may actually get some traction there because politics, after all, creates some unlikely marriages.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- the heads of the most powerful economies in Europe -- called Thursday for a clampdown on the type of speculative trading that is exacerbating Greece's debt crisis and undermined the euro in recent weeks.
Again, it was a practice Greece had been only too happy to dabble in. But, like on Wall Street, the joke stops being funny when it starts being you.
Sarkozy and Merkel want the European Commission president to look into the role of credit default swaps in the trading of government bonds in European countries.
Greece claims the traders of the swaps who bet against Greece's debt are raising its borrowing costs, making default more likely -- while racking up big profits for Wall Street banks and hedge funds at Greece's expense.
Prime Minister George Papandreou likened the practice to buying insurance on a neighbor's house and then burning it down to collect.
Essentially, Sarkozy and Merkel are in the same position I was two years ago.
If Greece defaults, that will threaten the euro and essentially prove correct the critics who claimed that one currency in Europe is a fool's proposition. Worse, though, it will likely trigger crises in the four or five other weak economies in the euro zone and set the whole foundation of the euro to wobbling.
No doubt it's galling for Sarkozy and Merkel to have to step in for Greece, which has constantly defaulted on its debt for the last 200 years or so. But the consequences of letting it topple could be worse.