Ahh. I stand corrected. Looking at your later post (which for some reason I can't respond to directly): so the derivatives are just what amplified the MBS cra

Ahh. I stand corrected. Looking at your later post (which for some reason I can't respond to directly): so the derivatives are just what amplified the MBS crash with leverage -- allowed organizations to put more money into toxic MBS assets than they would normally be able to with cash? All the splitting and recombining of MBS does that not act as a vehicle for laundering or coverup? I mean it wasn't technically laundering because it was completely legal to offer mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. But didn't the MBS allow banks to resell those poor assets which normally wouldn't have been sought after as investments? And the investments were leveraged through derivatives so that crashing of the poor quality assets were amplified? So it seems that there was a complex interaction of unregulated financial vehicles that caused the crisis and not simply "bad mortgages" or simply "derivatives" or simply "MBS". Any one of those alone would not have caused a huge bubble and crash, right? I do not have a background in finance, but I think it is important for a layperson to understand what happened.