BFT3K

The basics, yes, but this article reveals some seriously disturbing behind-the-scene details that are just as criminal as can be.

This is a bit more from the article, for example...

Bank of America should have gone out of business back in 2008. Just as the mortgage market was crashing, it made an inconceivably stupid investment in subprime mortgages, acquiring Countrywide and the billions in potential lawsuits that came with it. "They tried to catch a falling knife and lost their hand and foot in the process," says Joshua Rosner, a noted financial analyst. It then spent $50 billion buying a firm, Merrill Lynch, that was rife with billions in debts. With those two anchors on its balance sheet, Hugh McColl's bicoastal dream bank should have gone the way of the dinosaur.

But it didn't. Instead, in the midst of the crash, the government forked over $45 billion in aid to Bank of America ? $20 billion as an incentive to bring its cross-eyed bride Merrill Lynch to the altar, and another $25 billion as part of the overall TARP bailout. In addition, the government agreed to guarantee $118 billion in Bank of America debt.

So what did the bank do with that money? First, it sat by while lame-duck executives at Merrill paid themselves $3.6 billion in bonuses ? even though Merrill lost more than $27 billion that year. In all, 696 executives received more than $1 million each for helping to crash the storied firm. (The bank wound up hit with a $150 million fine for its failure to inform shareholders about the Merrill losses and bonuses.) Bank of America, meanwhile, paid out more than $3.3 billion in bonuses to itself, including more than $1 million each to 172 executives.