<div>First, let me set the scene.  The   housing market had collapsed with properties in many areas losing more than half   their value.  Banks had been pushing adjustable rate mortgages (ARM’s) and even   ‘interest only’ loans with high commissions that artificially inflated the   housing market instead of more traditional ‘fixed rate’ loans. Politicians in   Washington were demanding that loans be given to people who couldn’t reliably   pay them back.  Then to insulate themselves from the bad loans they had written,   companies like Goldman Sachs bundled those bad loans into a new financial   instrument called a mortgage backed security.  Those securities allowed Wall   Street to sell those bad loans back to regular people as AAA rated investments   through State pensions funds and other investment tools. I could go on and   on about how this fraud was committed at the behest of Wall Street and their   politicians, so the American people got burned by buying overvalued homes, got   burned again by being pushed into bad loans, and finally got burned by assuming   the risk of those bad loans through our pensions and other retirement accounts.    The American people had taken a beating, but Wall Street and the politicians   they owned were not done raiding our wealth.   
