The Netflix Challenge

If you had just come out of a year-long coma caused by an injury sustained when the wheels came off the out-of-control mortgage-backed securities machine at the center of the global financial crisis, you could well wonder whether anything had really changed. The Wall Street Journal headline on Oct. 1, 2009, will be a rude awakening. Firms are re-repackaging the same toxic assets that were rated by the same agencies that starred in the last financial disaster movie.

True, some key players had