The U.S. financial sector has some of the most sophisticated risk assessment technologies and most sound regulatory policies of any nation in the world. Yet from 2003 to 2007 the world watched a number of this country’s most mature financial institutions fling themselves off a fiscal cliff. And this in spite of the fact that the capital markets had experienced a catastrophic “bubble” just seven years earlier. How could this happen? How could our behavior diverge so profoundly from painfully recent knowledge?