Sorry I didn't see the show, so maybe I'm off-base. But.
Bad mortgage loans were the least of the problem. There were lots of bad mortgages, and they were/are a problem, yes. But at least they were secured by physical real estate.
But the reason there were so many bad mortgages made was because there was money to be made off securitizing them.
And even more importantly, there was even more money to be made off of betting about them (the infamous "credit derivatives"
– especially off of betting against them, betting that they WOULD eventually crater – as Goldman et al. did in fact bet, even while selling them to others.
And thanks to Paulson, Geithner, Obama, et al, we, YOU AND ME, made good on those bets. They were placed with an insolvent bookie, AIG; and Goldman and the others who placed them knew or should have known AIG wouldn't be able to make good on them; but thanks to Geithner et al, we bailed AIG out; so instead of having AIG go belly-up and letting Goldman et al. take cents on the dollar for their speculative, not to mention felonious claims, through a bankruptcy-like procedure, we enabled AIG to PAY those bets to Goldman et al. To the tune of $16 trillion or so.
And until you understand all that, you don't begin to grasp the looting that has occurred.
Edit history
Recommendations
0 members have recommended this reply (displayed in chronological order):
= new reply since forum marked as read