Nice of you to defend the bankers and insurance companies. let me expand on how this happened, I did this in another forum some time ago. Say Joe Blow wants to get a 300K loan from Countrycide, a national lender. A high school grad is writing his paperwork, but Joe only makes 50K a year, he won't qualify. The kid asks, do you have any other income? Joe says I mowed a lawn for $20 last weekend, the kid, a trained "professional" say's we'll just write that down as $200 a week, another $10K a year easily making the requirements. And the good news is, we'll put you in an ARM so your payments are low for 5 years, by that time your housing value will double and you can refi into a fixed! Joe signs the paperwork, the kid makes $3000K that day, he calls his upline on the golfcourse, who now makes $500 added to the 10 other guys under him, he decides to play another round. The office makes $300, PLUS that loan put them over the top, because, you see, Countrycide has a bonus program for that "product", and all winning sales in that office go to Hawaii! The district manager has met his quota with the 10 "stores" in has district and gets a $50K bonus for that quarter, his boss gets a $250K bonus in preferred stock which he quickly converts to offshore stocks. Countrycide must now have to have a 12% holdback to cover these loans, so they get loan insurance from AIG. AIG also must have a % to cover, so they insure their exposure from a re-insurance company, easy to do because THEY own it! Meanwhile to write more loans, Countrycide sells it's loans as fast as they can to lets say, Bank of UnAmerica. Bof U immediately bundles the loans and sell what they can to limit exposure, and what they cannot sell that way they either use AIG or split the loans up into "derivatives"-selling part of each loan since Morningstar has given a AAA rating to the loans and securities. Can you see it now, Nick? Not one of these companies cared if the loans were good, all of the individuals knew most were bad, but what was the incentive to tell the truth? Joe Blow was advised by a trained professional, he's a goddamn truckdriver, he thought he was doing what everybody else was doing (rightly so). The bankers, insurance execs, and countrycide execs all got off scott free, the high school kid is working at mcDonalds and is spitting in your burger as we speak, having spent all his money on surfboards and cronic. Almost 3 trillion dollars dissappeared from the economy, do you think we could use that money now, Nick? We were just days from the stone age, money would have meant nothing because all the major banks would have failed.