re: #353 Kenneth

A good interview with Niall Ferguson on his book The Accent of Money

(skip ahead to the 27:15 minute mark)

Key point: the credit crisis was created by the sub-prime mortgage bubble and the highly leveraged securitization of those loans.

I need to read that book. It’s my understanding that the CRA/sub-prime mortgage bubble is the underlying factor. After all, MBS and CRS products would have been okay if the underlying mortgages had been sound.

It’s also interesting that there are really only five states that were trashed: California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, and Michigan. So now, just like the Federal Emergency Relief Act during the Depression, folks in 45 states are forced to pick up the tab for these five.