Permit me an indulgence … I offer here an analogy to try to explain our sub-prime mortgage meltdown in late 2008 that cost the United States at least one trillion dollars and likely elected Barack Obama to the Presidency. This analogy will use a simple bank-robbery scenario to try to explain the actors and their roles in this (to me) criminal enterprise. Here is the cast:
- The Master Planners – Barney Frank and Chris Dodd whose drive for universal home ownership was the diabolical felonious scheme behind this travesty (with the template of the Community Development Act of 1974.)
- The Bank Robbers – Countrywide Finance, GMAC, Quicken and the myriad of other bucket-shop mortgage origination companies that sprung up during the last years before the meltdown … along with the complicity of the hundreds of thousands of homeowners who got these no-documentation mortgages using chicanery and mendacity.
- The Money Launderers (legitimizing the pelf acquired in this robbery) – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac abetted by all those financial institutions (e.g.s: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, etc.) that packaged up these mortgages (Collateralized Debt Obligations -- CDOs) to sell to these fences … AND all those players in the Credit-Default Swaps casino (AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, etc.)
- The Get-Away Car Drivers – the Credit Rating Agencies that gave these CDO’s unrealistically high credit ratings
- The Bank’s Security Force – those myriad Federal financial regulatory agencies who spent the period during the actual robbery lounging in the bank’s break room playing pinochle and watching porn on the bank’s security-system screens.
- The Bank’s Depositors (who lost their money in the robbery) –ordinary United States’ citizen-schlubs.
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