In January 2007, four small-time fund managers with few Wall Street connections invited themselves to a Las Vegas conference of players in the mortgage-bond business. The interlopers’ mission: to see if they were wrong in betting against subprime mortgage securities. They found a money manager who couldn’t care less if his clients lost everything on mortgage-related collateralized debt obligations (CDOs): he made money on quantity, not quality. They found a Bear Stearns CDO salesman more interested in playing cowboy at a shooting range than in discussing the housing market. They found ratings analysts utterly indifferent to their crucial jobs—assessing the risk of trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgage-related securities. And they learned about some of the average people who had taken out so many mortgages, including a stripper who was juggling five home-equity loans, all dependent on ever-rising home prices.
Read the rest of the City Journal article in which Nicole Gelinas looks at some of the top books on the crisis.
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