...The financial crisis that struck the Western world in the summer of 2007 provided a timely reminder of one of the perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear ... The proximate cause of the economic uncertainty of 2008 was financial: to be precise, a spasm in the credit markets caused by mounting defaults on a species of debt known euphemistically as subprime mortgages. So intricate has our global financial system become, that relatively poor families in states from Alabama or Wisconsin had been able to buy or remortgage their homes with often complete loans that (unbeknown to them) were then bundled together with other, similar loans, repackaged as collateralized debt obligations (CDO's) and sold by banks in New York and London to (among others) German regional banks and Norwegian municipal authorities who thereby became the effective mortgage lenders. These CDOs had been so sliced and diced that it was possible to claim that a tier of the interest payments from the original borrowers was as dependable a stream of income as the interest on a ten-year Treasury bond, an therefore worthy of a coveted triple A-rating. This took financial alchemy to a new level of sophistication, apparently turning lead to gold.
Aquí un link a The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World de Niall Ferguson.
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