CBS finally climbed aboard the wtf happened bandwagon tonight. Steve Croft had the feature story on 60 Minutes about what went wrong at Countrywide and Citi leading up to the great crash of owe eight.
Pretty much everybody on the planet already knows what went wrong. There's so many books written on the subject I had to put up extra shelves in the library here at Falling Downs.
It didn't just go wrong at Countrywide and Citi Bank. It was everywhere. Well, not everywhere of course. A lot of little regional banks came through the crisis pretty much unscathed. That would be your local bank if you live in Fargo or Bellingham or some other hick town where the bank folks know the town folks and the bank CEO is happy to be making the same annual income as the local high school principal.
Those weren't the guys who brought the roof down on the temple. It was the big dogs. The Lehman Brothers and the Goldman Sachs types, the operations where a guy three years out of Wharton felt entitled to a quarter million salary and a million dollar bonus.
To be honest, if I'd realized how easy they were making it to defraud them, I would have bought every house in Dade County back in the glory days before things hit the fan. They didn't care; they just kept sending out the loans because everybody in the loan-supply chain was getting huge bonuses knowing full well that at the end of the day there would be not a day of reckoning but a bailout.
60 Minutes tried to give their story a little juice by focusing on the fact that none of the guys at the top of the supply chain are cooling their heels in prison. Guys like Fuld at Lehman and Prince at Citi came out of the wreckage with hundred of millions of dollars in their piggy banks, every penny of which they ultimately owe to the generous and forgiving nature of the American taxpayer.
Not a lot of mystery to the mystery of why nobody's in jail. Obama sailed into the White House on the winds of more Wall Street campaign money than any presidential candidate in the sordid history of Wall Street campaign money.
That's why the crooks are too big to fail and too big to nail.
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