This trend dovetailed with another trend in the big banks, a transition from deriving much of their profit from loans to deriving it from fees for packaging mortgages (and other loans, such as credit card, auto loan, and student debt) into asset backed securities (ABS), selling ABSs and MBSs, creating dummy Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) to further reprocess MBSs into CDOs, and so forth. One estimate suggests that income from fee-related activities at commercial banks increased from 24 percent of total revenue in 1980 to 31 percent in 1990 to 48 percent in 2003.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 888