Collision Course

1982: Michael Bloomberg sells an electronic desktop terminal for trading in securities. Merrill Lynch, his first customer, buys 20.

1983: Fannie Mae issues the first collateralized mortgage obligation, making the secondary mortgage market much more attractive to investors and lenders.

1988: MCI Mail gets hitched to the Internet, the first commercial inroad into the government-run research network.

1989: Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist, creates the World Wide Web, which uses hypertext, or links, to connect electronic documents.

1993: The first Web browser, Mosaic, makes navigating the Internet as easy as pointing and clicking. Al Gore pushed through the financing.

1994: Charles Bowsher, the U.S. comptroller, warns that derivatives trading needs oversight; the Fed's Greenspan disagrees. 1995: Blythe Masters of J.P. Morgan invents credit default swaps, a method of insuring against loan defaults.

1999: The dotcom bubble, fueled by 'irrational exuberance,' bursts, spelling doom for many high-flying tech companies.

2000: Greenspan persuades U.S. legislators to strip the federal oversight agency of the power to regulate the growing market for derivatives.

2001: Countrywide begins its race to the top of the mortgage-lending market by designing new securities under looser guidelines. Its revenues start to soar.

2003: Responding to a recession brought on by the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Greenspan lowers short-term interest rates to 1 percent, a 50-year low.

2007: Brady Dougan becomes the first derivatives trader to reach the top spot of a major bank. When he became CEO of Credit Suisse, the company made eight trades about every four seconds.