"The shorthand version of the scam is by now familiar: Banks and mortgage lenders conspired to create a gigantic volume of very risky home loans, delivering outsize mortgages to dubious borrowers like immigrants without identification, the unemployed and people with poor credit histories. Then the banks took those dicey home loans and sprinkled them with bogus math, using inscrutable financial gizmos like collateralized mortgage obligations to rechristen the risky home loans as high-grade, AAA-rated securities that could be sold off to unions, pensioners, foreign banks, retirement funds and any other suckers the banks could find. In essence, America’s financial institutions grew vast fields of cheap oregano, and then went around the world marketing their product as high-grade weed."
Matt Taibbi, “Too Crooked to Fail” in this month’s Rolling Stone
