Ir is NOW obvious that bankers and regulators in the United States made major errors in recent years by not reining in financial leverage as well as myths that real-estate prices never fall. Seen from Tokyo, the U.S. mass delusion seems like a horrible replay of Japan's own bubble in the latter half of the 1980s-we're witnessing the aftermath of the same sort of real-estate lending boom, with a few minor differences: This one was inflated using securitiza-tion and derivatives, the more complicated U.S. way; due to the newfangled mortgage loans, more homeowners may get hurt; and a lot of U.S. investment bankers got rich along the way.
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