Dealers, wanting to boost trade volumes and their own bonuses, undertook speculations in the expectation that, if they failed, their banks would be bailed out. Some of that behaviour could be put down to what, back in 1996, Alan Greenspan notoriously called “irrational exuberance”, but much was due to a lack of transparency because the boards of prestigious banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, did not know what was happening on the London trading floors and in the tax havens where structured investment vehicles, collateralised debt obligations and CDOs-squared—and those are just the easy ones—were traded.