How Real Estate Appraisers Caused the present Economic Crisis

Yea! we confess. We Real Estate Appraisers created all those CDO thingies that caused the present economic crisis. We accomplished this, in between busting our asses our driving comps, searching data bases and calling appraisal management companies to try to pry our earned fees out of them.

What the hell is a CDO thingie anyway. The closest thing that I can think of is what they did in that movie, "The Producers" Remember "The Producers with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostell?

The big banks packaged up some shit that they knew, or should have known, was really bad and shorted it at the same time, either because they knew it was bad shit or they they had absolutely no idea of what they were doing and got lucky.

Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won

Exerpts from New York Times 12/24/2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/24trading.html?_r=1&hp

In late October 2007, as the financial markets were starting to come unglued, a Goldman Sachs trader, Jonathan M. Egol, received very good news. At 37, he was named a managing director at the firm.

Mr. Egol, a Princeton graduate, had risen to prominence inside the bank by creating mortgage-related securities, named Abacus, that were at first intended to protect Goldman from investment losses if the housing market collapsed. As the market soured, Goldman created even more of these securities, enabling it to pocket huge profits.

Goldman’s own clients who bought them, however, were less fortunate.

Pension funds and insurance companies lost billions of dollars on securities that they believed were solid investments, according to former Goldman employees with direct knowledge of the deals who asked not to be identified because they have confidentiality agreements with the firm.