However, this slow and almost unconscious shift was at the root of
the crisis. Yet, as more and more risky loans were issued in a world
where house prices were booming, nobody saw this as a real problem.
The practices in question became standard procedure and this, at the
very micro level, made them acceptable. Furthermore, through the dispersion
of these risks through derivatives throughout the global banking
sector there was seen to be no systemic threat. Indeed, with rare exceptions,
(see Freixas et al. 2000), little attention was paid to systemic risk in
the banking sector until very recently. As May and Arinaminpathy (2009)
point out