Fourteen years ago, while in the depths of the financial crisis, it was a mystery to many just how a mortgage system so chronically flawed could have cemented itself as the basis of the United States’ financial system. In the subsequent post-mortems and exposes, however, it became clear that this false legitimacy was based on both institutionally authorized opacity and backend technical systems good only for obscuring critical financial flaws. Ultimately, this created an information barrier that enabled rating agencies, government bureaucracies, and — most importantly — the big banks to negate the public’s interest while pursuing unsustainable financial practices.
