Thanks in part to those conflicts of interest and lack of competition that Senator Shelby had talked about, along with a good helping of old-fashioned greed, the credit rating agencies had assigned AAA ratings (even safer than Enron’s rating) to billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities that should have been labeled “junk.” If “tricking an

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That risk was magnified by the nature of the Manhattan Project’s participants. The single most important secret in the United States was left in the hands of people whom the national elite were not particularly inclined to trust: academics who had flirted with the far left, assorted European refugees whose allegiances were unclear, and pure oddball

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