Who caused the Wall Street Meltdown?

While major pundits say the Wall Street meltdown was caused by everything and everyone ,I say...

There were 3 major villains in the Wall Street meltdown: mortgage companies, credit agencies and major banks.

Mortgage companies, such as Angelo Mozilo’s, Countrywide Financial Corp, were real bad news. CFC provided sub-prime mortgages for minorities and low-income people. These so-called NINJA loans (no income, no job, no assets)were given to anyone with a pulse. No problem, the mortgage companies got their money up front. When the housing bubble burst, the firm collapsed. Mozilo, however, was but one player in the recent Wall Street flame out: Dean Starkman at the Columbia Journalism Review makes the case that Countrywide, along with Ameriquest, Washington Mutual and Citigroup were running “boiler rooms” –(seemingly illegal enterprises) at the direction of Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, etc. The purpose of these boiler rooms was to bring in as many mortgages as they could, so, even people without jobs and no money, could get one.

These junk mortgages were then shoveled through the doors of the banks and insurers like AIG and the hydra-headed banker, Goldman-Sachs. Bankers prevailed, as Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times notes, upon the rating agencies (since the banks paid them) to label the junk as AAA securities. These “troubled assets” were then sliced and diced, securitized , leveraged 30x and sold around the world as if they were gold. The business was such a money machine that it was impossible to say no to it. When the housing bubble burst, people lost their life savings, and countries went down. Quite a price to pay for such outrageous greed, deception and alchemy.