Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis

As our country is facing the most severe economic situation since The Great Depression, this book is a perfect read for those who would like to learn how it all happened. The author says that the capital markets - Wall Street - failed us. He explains the series of events in understandable language. There is not one individual or organization to blame for the crisis. It is more the combination of individuals and organizations working together. They all focused on only one thing: making money. Wall Street innovated mortgage-backed securities, which allowed more and more money to be allocated toward the housing market. Mortgage companies, wanting to make more money, worked really hard to find borrowers. When good quality borrowers were scarce, they went after less credit-worthy ones. Once these customers defaulted in large numbers, home prices started to fall and the recession began. This book is very educational. - Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

An easy & engaging read. It connected most, if not all, of the financial dots for me.

Well written, well researched and has the juicy stuff too. A broker standing on his desk yelling at the loan reviewers to go faster, faster, faster in approving loans (so he can get his commission). Great background on Angelo Mozila, the king of subprime, and a fun story about Lewie Ranieri, whose Texas employees thought they were getting a mob boss instead of a banker. It will make you laugh, and make you cry because government has given away the bank to the crooks again. These crooks are in suits and rob all of us with a pen. U.S. taxpayers, investors, and pension funds will be trying to choke down these bad loans and ABSs for a long time.

We can better understand our mortgage and financial crisis by understanding human nature. Muolo's and Padilla's story unfolds from the point of view of the actual participants. They show us that what we thought was a vibrant financial system was actually a flimsy stack of cards created by irresponsible people, so that when those at the bottom, the borrowers, stopped paying their mortgages, the house of cards collapsed. Who's to blame? Everyone, especially the proponents of deregulation. Who are the biggest losers? Taxpayers, who will bail out those who were deregulated.

A new book documents the house of financial cards that continues to come tumbling down all around us in the mortgage and real estate industries. Chain of Blame, co-authored by Paul Muolo and Orange County Register reporter Matthew Padilla, offers a comprehensive view of the mortgage debacle but concentrates on the subprime lenders and their Wall Street allies (and in some cases, owners) who pooled and packaged subprime loans into securities without due care for credit quality, greedily booking billions in fees while hoping that real estate prices would accelerate upwards forever to make up for their lack of underwriting. The book's analysis of the mortgage mess shows how the contagion didn't just halt at our own borders, like the savings and loan scandal of a generation ago did, but flared up worldwide through the overseas sale of poorly-understood and poorly-underwritten collateralized debt obligations containing the worst tranches of a bad book of business. Chain of Blame also lucidly points out how the creative financing of many lenders, which led to an over-reliance on interest-only and payment-option mortgages, fed the superheated real estate market by putting thousands of new borrowers into the market, creating a demand that sent RE prices zooming to unsustainable increases of up to 33% a year in some markets.