The reason that American financial culture was so difficult to change—the reason the political process would prove so slow to force change upon it, even after the subprime mortgage catastrophe—was that it had taken so long to create, and its assumptions had become so deeply embedded. There was an umbilical cord running from the belly of the exploded beast back to the financial 1980s. The crisis of 2008 had its roots not just in the subprime loans made in 2005 but in ideas that hatched in 1985.
Michael Lewis
The Big Short
