The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge

This article analyzes the role played in the credit crisis of the processes by which different groups of market participants produce knowledge about financial instruments. Employing documentary sources and a set of 76 predominantly oralhistory interviews, the article presents a historical sociology of the clusters of evaluation practices surrounding ABSs (asset-backed securities) and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). Despite the close structural similarity between ABSs and CDOs, these practices came to differ substantially, and became the province (e.g. in the rating agencies) of organizationally separate groups. In consequence, when ABS CDOs (CDOs in which the underlying assets are ABSs) emerged, they were evaluated in two separate stages. This created a fatally attractive arbitrage opportunity, large-scale exploitation of which sidelined a previously important set of gate keepers (risk-sensitive investors in the lower tranches of ABSs) and eventually magnified and concentrated the banking system’s calamitous mortgage-related losses.