Balls.

Herd behavior overcame the so called "rules" of the financial industry.

Hell - a perfect storm of greed, patronage, and drinking their own kool aid is what created the crisis. Not natural hazard.

They believed their own shit about "bring the smartest people in the room", when any analyst knows that models or forecasts which differ dramatically from the rest of Wall Street are "wrong and need to be brought in in line."

The fact that rating agencies were toilet paper was an in-joke, which was maintained because it "fit" the model and expectations of how the world is supposed to work (incentives = results. Something which obviously can't work with rating agencies, but hey! How can you incentivize honesty unless you pay for it, right?. Wink wink)

The people following each other off a cliff like a bunch of lemmings, were the same people who for every year before that looked down on "Main Street", proclaimed their superiority in all things prognostication, and also said that in their world being wrong meant losing everything. This is the bullshit which frankly, we bought as a species

This is as much a natural hazard as believing politicians when they say "vote for us, we'll fix everything".

The guys who fucked ups were the guys who promised they didn't need rules because they spent all the time working to be right because being wrong meant "death".

When in reality, all the time the and se were the guys who just followed whomever they considered the "leader", cynically knew that ratings were a joke, intentionally brought diverging opinions into conformity because they couldn't predict squat, And kept doing this because they felt they just had to pay lip service to rules because a bunch of plebs voted in something called government.