Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis

ProPublica reports:

• Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history. Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:

They created fake demand.

• A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

For more, see Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis.

Thanks to Mike Dillon at GetDShirtz.com for the heads-up on the story.