Johns Hopkins Lecture on Black Box Casino: Pricing the Key Causes of the Financial Crisis of 2008
Class Lecture Carey School of Business Johns Hopkins University Washington, D.C. Campus April 17, 2012 By Robert Stowe England For most Americans, a thick fog still shrouds the origins of the financial crisis. This is true despite the fact three years have past since the crisis burst on the scene in September 08 with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Finding the answer to what went wrong is what compelled me to write Black Box Casino. In the end, it was a detective story where even a list of important actors could run into the hundreds. At the center of origins of the crisis is a single industry – the mortgage industry. As senior writer for Mortgage Banking magazine since 1988, I have reported on the vast changes sweeping through the industry for more than two decades. We’ve come a long way. In the early 1990s, the mortgage industry was disciplined by the free market. It was flexible and innovative. New loan products would appear and market players would experime...