Michael Lewis
While Wall Street built a towering machine of toxic debt, a few misfit investors looked at the actual math, bet against the American housing market, and made billions when the global economy collapsed.
Financial institutions prioritized short-term profits over long-term stability, shifting the risk of bad loans to unsuspecting investors rather than managing it.
Wall Street utilized needless complexity, such as collateralized debt obligations, to hide the extreme risk of subprime mortgages and create a false sense of security.
Rating agencies abandoned rigorous analysis, assigning top safety ratings to pools of terrible loans simply because they were paid by the very banks creating the financial products.