And who forced the banks to roll these high risk mortgages into packages and unload them to investors under false pretenses?
The Goldman-Sachs crowd is playing the "poor little rich boy" card, I'm not buying it. They aren't the victims here, the American taxpayers are.
“As we’ve noted literally dozens of times before, the financial crisis’ origins lay in Bill Clinton’s decision in the early 1990s to use Big Government to force banks to make mortgage loans to low-income people who were bad credit risks. “
From what I’ve read the majority of high risk subprime mortgages, and certainly the riskiest, were written by ‘shadow bank’ firms that were completely exempt from the Community Reinvestment Act. These loans were entirely voluntary on their part, unlike deposit-taking banks which were covered by CRA.
They were writing these mortgages because they wanted the high-yield paper as fodder for the MBSs and derivatives they were creating from them. There was very big money in this business until it blew up.