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What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.

Bank of America is to sweetheart loans and Democratic Party payoffs as Paula Deen is to sugar and bacon grease.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.

Movie stars today are as greedy for additional kids as bankers are for bonuses. It's the new badge of authenticity.

Between the Community Redevelopment Act, requiring banks to make what I would call very weak loans, and specific quotas that the Congress imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that created the market demand that really led to the subprime phenomenon.

Subprime mortgages, typically defined as those issued to borrowers with low credit scores, make up roughly the riskiest one-third of all mortgages.

The universe of mortgage lending has gotten to the point where there is a place in it for everybody.

Of course, bankers were always interested in making money. But when bankers had clients, they bore some responsibility for the clients' welfare.

Every regulatory speech on derivatives takes a bow to their hedging 'benefits.' Less publicly, regulators pay their respects to derivative profits, a blessed relief from the banks' troubled loans to less-developed countries, highly leveraged companies, and real estate swingers.