The crisis was caused by mispricing: investment bankers were able to sell poor securities for full value based on misleading ratings. This mispricing was supported by the absence of a transparent secondary market for these mortgage-related securities. If we had transparent prices, a lot of the bad things that happened would not have happened. In particular the housing bubble would have been much less, and the investment bankers would not have been able to make such clever use of the rating agencies and create tens-of-thousands of senseless securities obfuscating prices. Even a tiny bit of good market design would have averted the financial crisis by preventing its root cause: the sale of subprime mortgages as near-riskless securities.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 870