Slashdot Mirror
Email Trails Show Bankers Behaving Badly
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is running a pair of stories about U.S. financial institutions being investigated by the Federal government and courts for alleged systemic and illegal activities that helped bring about the housing crisis and collapse of the world economy in 2008. Emails produced during courtroom discovery reveal that insiders at JP Morgan Chase knew that the bundles of securities they were marketing to investors were rotten with bad loans. And emails show the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's (a division of McGraw-Hill) was determined to stop losing deals to its competitors by being too tough on the banks whose products they were evaluating."
Those "bag-of-shit" securities were, in very large part, guaranteed by the US Gov't. That Wall Street Banks offered crap investment opportunities that no one understood is nearly as bad as the so-called investors who bought them with an equal lack of understanding, and don't get me started on people who "bought" homes they could never, ever make the payments on that formed the basis for the "bag-of-shit" investments no one understood.
That they were "highly-rated" by the security analyst firms means very little - I'll leave you with this sage advice from that classic film "Tommy Boy"
Ken