This is a great article by Michael Lewis on the current financial crisis that my friend sent me.  It has a great analysis of what’s going on told from the point of view of someone who saw it coming. It’s long, but I’d highly recommend reading the whole thing. In very very short form: the people at the financial companies at the center of this crisis had no motivation to actually understand what they were doing as long as the money kept coming in, since the shareholders (and now, apparently, the US government) were the ones taking on the actual financial risk. None of the people at these companies cared or understood what they were doing.