Michael Lewis
A small group of misfit investors realized the US housing market was built on bad loans and made billions betting against the system before the 2008 crash.
Wall Street repackaged extremely risky subprime mortgages into complex bonds that rating agencies wrongly labeled as safe investments.
Most financial professionals were incentivized by short-term profits to ignore the looming housing market collapse.
A few outsider investors discovered the underlying rot and purchased credit default swaps as an insurance policy against the failing bonds.