For those riding the roller coaster of 2008, and retrospectively searching for previous wrong turns, it seemed obvious to focus on the sector wherefrom disasters cascaded one after another like clowns piling out of an auto: namely, Wall Street. Not only had finance become the four-hundred-pound gorilla of the U.S. economy, accounting for 41 percent of all corporate profits in 2007, but it was also the arena where economic theory had seemed to matter to a greater degree than elsewhere, given recourse to formal models to “justify” all manner of activities, from securitization and options pricing to risk management. Thus it was fairly predictable that some economists would look to finance theory as the prime locus of error, and rapidly settled upon a single doctrine to scapegoat, the one dubbed the efficient-markets hypothesis (EMH).

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 748