Is there a particular area (government, Wall Street, entertainment, capitalist culture) that dominated?
It’s a combination. Our regulators failed us miserably. The influence of lobbyists and money on our politicians is unseemly. There’s a term called “captured regulators,” where eventually the regulators of any highly technical industry (like banking) come to protect the industries they’re supposed to be regulating, instead of citizens who need protection from their business practices. Part of the reason this happens is due to the arcane nature of the regulations. Another reason is the revolving door between government and banking; if you’re a regulator at the SEC, chances are your next job is going to be at one of the banks you’ve been regulating. From allowing predatory subprime mortgages to be sold to allowing the banks to predict their own level of acceptable risk, there was a huge breakdown in the regulatory structure. Alan Greenspan believed that it was in the best interest of the marketplace for financial institutions to regulate themselves, that they’d never do anything to put th
