The mortgage meltdown as normal accidental wrongdoing

greed and fraudulent behavior of mortgage industry participants. Our analysis suggests that the mortgage industry's complex and tightly coupled technology made it vulnerable to failure and that the greed and fraudulent behavior of mortgage industry participants, however reprehensible, played a minor role in the meltdown. The dominant discourse on the mortgage meltdown also attributes the meltdown to insufficient regulatory control. Our normal accident analysis also suggests that insufficient regulatory oversight contributed to the debacle. But our analysis implies that simply increasing the amount of regulation over the mortgage industry is unlikely to reduce its susceptibil ity to failure in the future. Indeed, if additional regulation increases the system's complexity and coupling, it could increase the system's susceptibility to failure.