Quote:
Originally Posted by ThunderBalls
You're going to tell me a 158 year old bank started dishing out bad mortgages out of the blue?
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Lehman was
THE biggest underwriter of bonds backed by mortgages. Lehman has been
THE world leader in creating and selling subprime mortgage backed securities since the mid 1990s. At first they only packaged the loans of other mortgage lenders and resold them. In the late 1990s they started their own subprime unit and then they bought two subprime mortgage lenders. They were in it early and pretty much owned the market for years. Lehman owned two large subprime mortgage companies. In just two years they collateralized more than $100 billion in subprime mortgages.
The other big player early on in writing mortgage backed securities was - drumroll, please - Bear Stearns.
Check out Soros' new book on the mortgage crisis which contains what I think is the most thorough history of the mortgage backed securities industry.