Bankers' Song - We Didn't See It Comin [PLUS BONUS NPR article!]

How Wall Street Made The Mortgage Crisis Worse:
by Adam Davidson

Planet Money partnered on this story with the investigative reporters at ProPublica. For more, see ProPublica.org.

I'm going to cut to the chase and tell you our conclusion first.

We believe we can show that some Wall Street bankers had evidence, a year or two before the financial crisis hit, that there were serious problems with subprime mortgage investments.

Rather than wind down this business, they sped it up using financial trickery. These people earned huge bonuses for their actions. They also made the crisis considerably larger and more damaging.


The folks we're talking about work in the CDO department of big Wall Street banks — "the sexiest place to work on Wall Street," in the words of....


[link to www.npr.org]