All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

JOE NOCERA: Well, our key point is that it took a lot of disparate things to make this happen. If you had only Wall Street’s venality and greed, you would have had a problem, but not a crisis. If you had only had the predatory lending practices of the subprime companies, you would have had a problem, but not a crisis. And if you had only had Washington’s—though this kind of enabled everything—Washington’s deregulatory emphasis under both Democrats and Republicans, let’s be clear here, you would have had a problem. But when you combine the three of them and then you watch them interact with each other, you watch the way Wall Street gets the subprime people to make their loans worse and worse and worse, and you watch the way the subprime people take advantage of Wall Street to sell their loans upstream, and then you watch the way Wall Street takes advantage of investors to sell them these crappy loans, what’s supposedly AAA, and you watch the government look the other way—when you put it all together, you have a really toxic stew. And so, I think most people have looked at this as the sins of Wall Street, and it’s absolutely the sins of Wall Street, but it required an awful lot more: an almost societal-wide delusion about home prices and value and, you know, what home ownership actually meant.

AMY GOODMAN: Who were the main culprits? Name them.

JOE NOCERA: OK. In terms of institutions... Watch / Read