My comment at a houston blog:

what tanked the market? An idea, theory, philosophy and then math and politics designed to get out of the way and let that philosophy work its magic.

to know what tanked you need to know such things as the Gaussian copula function, you also need to look away from Fannie in an effort to cover your assumption. Fannie didn’t fund, invest nor bundle the mortgages that were used to make the CDOs that failed.

The mortgages were sold by the mortgage industry, a strong believer in the faith of finance. Look at the sales manuals, training videos etc of now defunct companies to learn more…

Print this out and read it, then consider this:

If you are 15, you have lived through 4 of these failures.
If you are 40, you have lived through 6 of these failures.
If you are 70, you have lived through 7 of these failures.

You don’t need to even know what a quant is nor a false premise, to see the trend.— there will be more, they occur more often.