Cutting Through Economic Obfuscation--A Reality-Based Narrative About The Economic Meltdown

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Cutting Through Economic Obfuscation--A Reality-Based Narrative About The Economic Meltdown
by: Paul Rosenberg
Sat May 09, 2009 at 18:15
http://openleft.com/diary/13257/cutting-through-economic-obfuscationa-realitybased-narrative-about-the-economic-meltdown

The Center for Public Integrity has issued a new report, Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown? The Top 25 Subprime Lenders and Their Wall Street Backers. As explained on their blog:

Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown? The Top 25 Subprime Lenders and Their Wall Street Backers is a mammoth study on the financial meltdown, why it happened, and who is responsible.

We're not saying any one person should be singled out for blame, necessarily. However, we are providing a few candidates based on the facts. Think of this as a tripod of blame - a three-legged stool of responsibility, or better yet, irresponsibility:

First, there are the subprime lenders - the worst of which saturated the airwaves with commercials, bombarded e-mail inboxes with spam, and happily made loans to virtually anyone who could sign their name.

Second, there are the giant Wall Street and European investment banks that backed all that subprime lending. They put up hundreds of billions of dollars so they could create securities from these risky mortgages to sell to investors.

And lastly, there is the government that stood by and did nothing. Bottom line: We have witnessed a massive regulatory failure of catastrophic proportions.


In this project we identify the top "Subprime 25" lenders. We report that at least 21 of them were either owned or financed by a financial institution that has received government bailout money, and that four of these have paid big settlements for lending abuses.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/blog/entry/1354/