60 Minutes interviewed Michael Lewis. For those of you who didn’t get to the book, this program did a nice summary for you. (If you can ignore the ED commercials, it is well worth your time.)

There are two major threads to this story. One is how the few people on Wall Street who saw the storm coming saw it, and held onto their belief in the face of the thousands who didn’t. The other is why the thousands didn’t see what should have been obvious.

"There are a handful of characters who actually had seen it coming and made a fortune off of it. And there were so few of them, and there were so many people who had been on the other side that I thought that I kind of wondered who they were and why they got themselves into that position," Lewis said. "What they saw. Almost more how they saw."

“Asked how many people he thinks were in the world who understood what was going on, Lewis told Kroft, "Between 10 and 20 investors at most and this is from the universe of tens of thousands of people who could have conceivably made that bet."

60 Minutes asked how the huge mistakes were made by high-paid executives,

…Lewis thinks the fiasco had more to do with Wall Street stupidity than corruption. Lewis explains:

"Wall Street is able to delude itself because it's paid to delude itself. I mean one of the lessons of this story is that people see what they're incentivized to see. If you pay someone not to see the truth, they will not see the truth. And, Wall Street organized itself so people were paid to see something other than the truth. And that's one of the central messages of this story. You have to be very careful how you incentivize people, 'cause they will respond to the incentives…"

I’ve been talking-up this book for months. I found that lots of people I know have read it. Here are two examples of what I heard:

My uncle Joel said his big question is “why haven’t truckloads of people gone to jail?”

My financial planner is more cynical. His take is that it will happen again; if there is a way to game the system, someone will find it.

Common sense on the street knew the lending practices of the 00s were a train-wreck waiting to happen. Still, the guys with their hands on the money were lining their pockets as they led the American economy to the brink of disaster.

Fool me once, shame on me (Savings and Loan Crisis, 1989.) Fool me twice… what is wrong with our economic system?