Who Screwed The Economy?

Phil Gramm started it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Gramm

A Republican Senator (started out as a Democrat), who switched parties in 1983, probably because of who was President at the time? What an asshole.

So if you look at this http://banking.senate.gov/conf/fintl1.pdf

See page 7, item D: "(D) Issuing or selling instruments representing interests in pools of assets permissible for a bank to hold directly.". They are setting up for the knockout...yep, slick Willy signed it too.

This let the banks pool mortgages and consider them an "asset", thus they are something the can put on the market. It allowed the double leveraging to start things off back in 2000.

Then these same "assets" were allowed to be insured, which is why once the Mortgages started failing, AIG owed a lot of people a whole lot of money. So now we are paying AIG to pay the people they owe, who already made a ton of cash from premiums when these "assets" were doing well.

It's not much different than the ponzi scheme Madoff pulled, just this is "legal".