The people in the middle only knew their part of the business too. They did their job then went home and watched t.v. No one involved was watching the big picture.
Ok, I understated. They want some kind of return.
Yes, it was. The people buying paper bit by bit lowered the standards of what they would accept because the demand for what they were producing remained high.
If they could have, someone would have. You think everyone lost their asses buying crap on purpose? It's impossible to overestimate how much more obvious something seems when you're looking back at it.
If they had 40 years of data, they had 40 years of data. They couldn't create more data where home prices drop out of whole cloth. Like all programming, garbage in, garbage out.
The mention of a smirk is no kind of information. Yes, the mention of the smirk inflamed you. It was meant to. As for the maybach, it's not so much that as the desire of everyone in every industry to have someone else do their work for them. From doctors prescribing whatever was explained to them over lunch to some bond rating agency employee accepting the math provided by the CDO architect it's all the same.
The whole situation is much, much more complicated than presented in one article. You can blame everyone from the person taking out too large a loan to alan greenspan for keeping T-Bills at 1%. Picking one part of the industry and blaming them because of one article you read is ridiculous.