the understanding of what had gone wrong in the first place has steadily shifted. Initially, there was almost no understanding at all: baffling news reports about credit default swaps suggested only sorcery going wrong. Slowly but surely, however, the world has learned that the banks that busted the global economy were also consumed with old-fashioned skulduggery: rigging rates, ripping off customers, and laundering Mexican drug money. Courtesy of the Lux tax leaks on sweetheart corporate deals, and the HSBC files, documenting Swiss lockers stacked with bricks of cash, the world learned much more, too, about the tax-dodging lengths that private wealth will go to in order to keep public coffers empty.
