 Epistemic virtue is also important for an effective governance or regulation of financial activities. For example, a salient epistemic failing that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis seems to be the way that Credit Rating Agencies rated mortgage-backed securities and other structured finance instruments, and with related failures of financial due diligence, and faulty risk management (Warenski 2008). Credit Rating Agencies provide estimates of credit risk of bonds that institutional investors are legally bound to use in their investment decisions. This may, however, effectively amount to an institutional setup in which investors are forced by law partly to outsource their risk management, which fails to foster epistemic virtue (de Bruin 2017). Beyond this, epistemic failures can also occur among regulators themselves, as well as among relevant policy makers (see further in  section 5.1).