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The financial crisis has many facets. I was deeply interested in the subject at the and in the ensuing years afterwards. I highly recommend Michael Lewis' book
by ataturk 9y ago
The financial crisis has many facets. I was deeply interested in the subject at the and in the ensuing years afterwards. I highly recommend Michael Lewis' books on the subject, especially "The Big Short." The film was decent, but didn't go into the same amount of detail as the book.
There was much fraud, especially in two places: At the ratings agencies who turned garbage bonds into A+++ good to go, never-gonna-lose investments. They should have all gone to jail for that.
The second place was at the banks doing no-doc mortgages because the bankers had huge demand for the crap bonds and the result was that lenders were both outright fabricating loans or lending money to illegal immigrants who couldn't speak any English and didn't even have jobs. Tons of un-prosecuted fraud all over the place there. A few people went to jail, not many. Look at Wachovia Bank and Countrywide as two examples.
The other place there was not fraud but enormous unethical behavior was in the sale of CDOs--the "insurance" policies that backed up all the garbage bonds with huge leverage. CDOs took down Bear Stearns and in all honesty, should have taken down all the big players including Goldman Sachs, but the Fed stepped in and bailed them out to the tune of trillions of dollars.
The American public paid the price. If you recall the $4-5+/gal gasoline from 2009 and on? That was all part of the bailout scheme. And your 401K took a huge hit, some people still haven't recovered from that time period.
Regular people paid literally out of their own pockets so that a bunch of shitbirds could stay billionaires. We allowed corrupt politicians to bail out their pals and we didn't do anything. We the people should have revolted and shot every one of those stinking crooks. Instead, we the people are treated for what we are--a bunch of doormats.