mathbabe

I usually like Taibbi, author of the famous GS Vampire Squid article in Rolling Stone.
His piece is good here, though I fault him in his postscript he gets a bit sloppy. Court-ready is tricky – we all hope crooks get prosecuted, but it can be tough here to present an airtight case and sue the right parties. As he would acknowledge, the deals are incredibly complex with many parties. So it is very expensive to get the case to where it needs to be to win (and get anything substantial back), even more so for investors who may be a disperse group.
He also throws in a lob (also in the ps) about banks making affordable housing loans. Bear was a buyer, not an originator, of such loans, which they quickly securitized and sold off to investors. So they provided some of the funding – banks were happy making such loans in part because it did help them meet affordable housing goals/mandates. All part of the perfect storm, that took many catalysts (rating agencies, insurers, investors, easy credit, low rates that made any additional yield attractive, people willing to borrow more than they could afford,…)

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