Michael Lewis, the author of a great book about Wall Street in the 8o’s called Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, has written an article for Portfolio that everyone should read if they want to understand the roots of today’s financial crisis. As he notes in the article’s introduction:

[Since the 80’s, I’ve been] waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.

Until, eventually, it all fell apart. Read The End, and learn.