[dbond]

Bankers created the sub-prime market by offering mortgages to people they knew couldn't afford the repayments, they then packaged these bad debts with a few good quality debts on top and passed the resulting package off as good. They then sold these packages off to other banks or investment groups to make a profit and export their exposure.

Banks which gained exposure to the bad debt employed bankers who were either negligent in investigating the contents of the debt they were acquiring and invested their depositors money without due care and attention, or knew the risks of what they were doing and continued to gamble with their depositors money while skimming large amount off as their own. These banks had then lost their depositors money and demanded that the public bail them out, while still taking large salaries and bonuses.

There will of course be other factors in something like a global financial "collapse" but this is my understanding of the sub-prime situation and why you should be angry. Somewhere along the line the actions of some of the bankers should be criminal.

[tyfon]

It didn't help that the rating agencies rated these securities as AAA (investment grade quality).

This is in a nutshell what happened. http://www.slideshare.net/roguemonk/the-subprime-crisis-prim...

[MichaelBurge]

What in there was actually a crime though? The people who try to sell you timeshares with high-pressure sales tactics are also pretty scummy, but we don't throw them in jail for selling bad investments. The slideshare mentions they couldn't sell them to 'windows and orphans': I'm assuming these needed to be sold to accredited investors.

Accredited investors get pitched bad investments all the time; many people here may work for startups that are one of them. Some startups get growth using scummy marketing techniques just to offload the company to investors like Google before it implodes. Some of those investors may be VCs managing, e.g., the Northwest Plumbers' Pension Fund or the Kansas School Board. None of those VCs should go to jail, even if they are mismanaging the money in some cases(I'm not making a claim that they are, overall).

The depositors at the banks should be covered by the FDIC, so they aren't really at risk. The FDIC threaten to recover some of their money from the executives and accountants, and agencies tend to follow up on this sort of thing.

What exactly is so wrong with selling bad investments to other companies that we should throw them in jail? That the investments were AAA ratings should be irrelevant: they are just rankings from private companies, so they should carry as much legal weight as asking your bartender for advice on the stock market.

(edit) My assumption that AAA ratings carry no legal weight is false. I found this, which has a good overview: http://www.sec.gov/news/studies/credratingreport0103.pdf

This is a mess: You can't use private companies to set regulations, even if it appears to work some of the time. It's just as bad as making laws that require me to only use my bartender's highest-rated stocks when investing the local college's endowment fund. They need to either scrap it from the law or set up a separate government agency that does nothing but evaluate creditworthiness of securities.

Still though - where is the actual crime? Private companies scumming each other for money is to be expected, and would only be a problem if they actually lied on a contract(rather than merely neglecting to do due diligence).

Was the suggestion to send the thousands of people who made fraudulent loan applications - after being egged on by salespeople - to jail(possibly with the salespeople)? That's plausible, but not a crime of the bankers.

[giaour]

Those AAA ratings meant that mortgage-backed securities could be included in risk-averse mutual funds or bought by endowments or pension funds. That spread the risk to parties that would probably never knowingly invest in subprime mortgages on a large scale.

It also meant that bankers could craft poisonous securities, get them rated AAA, and then massively short them. I recall one case like that, though I'm blanking on the details.

[slavik81]

The real truth the crisis underscored is that the ratings agencies are useless at actually scrutinizing the risks on the things they rate. The fact that they remain a trusted arbitrator for certain investor classes is concerning, because it implies that as useless as they are, they're still more competent than institutional investors. Personally, I'm glad I don't have to trust my retirement savings to a pension fund.

[icebraining]

The fact that they remain a trusted arbitrator for certain investor classes is concerning, because it implies that as useless as they are, they're still more competent than institutional investors.

There's another interpretation: by "trusting" these rating agencies, institutional investors can shift the blame when the investments go wrong.

[desdiv]

>The real truth the crisis underscored is that the ratings agencies are useless at actually scrutinizing the risks on the things they rate.

Enron was rated investment grade by the rating agencies four days before its bankruptcy. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...