Take the world of finance: in coming months, on the 10th anniversary of the last great financial crisis, there will be a new round of debate about why banks and regulators missed the risks in the credit system before 2008.
There are multiple reasons why this happened but one important factor was that before 2008 the big banks such as UBS, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup spent a great deal of time fretting about issues that seemed obviously risky — hedge funds or highly leveraged companies — but tended to ignore anything that seemed safe or boring, such as the mortgage-backed securities carrying an AAA tag or conduits (an entity designed by financiers to hold AAA securities). As a result, the problems with mortgage securities that sparked the 2008 crisis were mostly hidden in plain sight — and widely overlooked.
There are multiple reasons why this happened but one important factor was that before 2008 the big banks such as UBS, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup spent a great deal of time fretting about issues that seemed obviously risky — hedge funds or highly leveraged companies — but tended to ignore anything that seemed safe or boring, such as the mortgage-backed securities carrying an AAA tag or conduits (an entity designed by financiers to hold AAA securities). As a result, the problems with mortgage securities that sparked the 2008 crisis were mostly hidden in plain sight — and widely overlooked.
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