Entender la crisis

Este parrafo (aca) de Bill Henderson el blog de empirical legal studies es una manera muy sencilla de entender la crisis

"Sometime during the 1990s, momentum began to build on Wall Street for securitizing home mortgages in new and exotic ways. Residential real estate seemed like an attractive business because the yields were decent, the historical default rates were low, risk of loss was mitigated by pooling thousands of mortgages (which were, themselves, divided into parts), and the underlying assets (homes) generally went up in value, sometimes by a lot in major metropolitan areas. Institutional investors had an insatiable appetite for these debt instruments, which were graded as safe by all the major rating agencies. Further, respected companies like AIG wrote insurance on these instruments on the theory that they would never have to pay. All the risk was supposedly hedged by "credits swaps," which are fancy and unregulated contracts between private parties. So money gushed in. Because virtually any loan could be sold the next day to Wall Street (who, in turn, could repackage them for a large profits within a short time), banks and other mortgage originators could make money with no risk (zero risk!). This cycle continued even though the pool of mortgage applicants became weaker and weaker--eventually people with (a) bad credit, (b) no assets, and (c) no job. This had the predictable effect of driving up the price of real estate to a frothy bubble. "