The Year of Living Stupidly

At every opportunity, people took insane risks in 2008. Even Canadians!

Illustration by John Ueland for TIME

In a disaster, the key is to remain calm and make informed choices. If you're a dork. Disaster is actually a great excuse to do whatever you want. What is a riot if not a chance to grab a free flat screen?

So with the Great Depression II: Greater and Furiouserâ„¢ approaching, this was a year of massive risk-taking. At every turn, we used chaos as an opportunity to take the nest egg and gamble it--but only after leveraging that nest egg with complicated derivatives that would famously come back to bore the crap out of us. ( See the...

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