[Toddsterpatriot]

It’s my impression that due to CFMA 2000 banks were able to take on very high levels of risk in mortgage-related derivatives.

I don't consider typical MBS to be derivatives. They're usually a pile of mortgages. In some cases, sliced into tranches of different grades.

[Pelham]

Weren’t the banks also able to invest in the derivatives based upon mortgage backed securities? The ‘CDOs Squared’, the ‘Synthetic CDOs’, and other instruments that Warren Buffett in a moment of clarity mockingly called “weapons of mass financial destruction”.

I thought that this was the sort of fire that banks had been able to play with.

I know that Credit Default Swaps (CDS), which are more of an insurance product than a derivative, played a big role in the mess. There was a way to use an unlimited number of CDSs to bet against the very mortgages that you were writing, even when you didn’t hold any of them. An incentive to write bad loans knowing that your CDSs would pay off when the mortgages defaulted.