A Center for Public Integrity Project
“The top subprime lenders whose loans are largely blamed for triggering the global economic meltdown were owned or backed by giant banks now collecting billions of dollars in bailout money — including several that have paid huge fines to settle predatory lending charges. The banks that funded the subprime industry were not victims of an unforeseen financial collapse, as they have sometimes portrayed themselves, but enablers that bankrolled the type of lending threatening the financial system.”
Go to the website . . .
I haven’t read CPI’s report yet, but I’ve heard rumblings though various channels that Wall Street was aggressively hiring mathematicians, physicists, etc. to develop the derivatives computer models that drove the huge returns and the ultimate bust. With the tremendous resources and talent Wall Street had available to it, the decision makers who would have chosen to move forward implementing those models would have had an excellent idea how all this was going to end up before they even said “Go”. But even before that, someone made the decision to recruit these scientific masterminds in order to build the models, so the ideation for this reality had to have been developed well before the first mathematician put chalk to chalkboard. Where were these concepts hatched, and was greed the only motive?