House of Cards: The U.S. Mortgage Mess << '60 Minutes'

A timely segment aired recently on the CBS News show ‘60 Minutes’ that featured a look at the subprime mortgage loan crisis.

This from CBS News:

House Of Cards: The Mortgage Mess

It was another nervous week for the world’s financial markets and for Wall Street. In the last six months, Americans have seen their investments shrink, their property values plummet, and the country edge closer towards a recession. At the heart of the problem is something called the subprime mortgage crisis, which began last summer and continues to ricochet through the economy.

It sounds complicated, but it’s really fairly simple. Banks lent hundreds of billions of dollars to homebuyers who can’t pay them back. Wall Street took the risky debt, dressed it up as fancy securities, and sold it around the world as safe investments. It sounds like a shell game or Ponzi scheme; in some ways, it was a house of cards rife with corruption, greed, and negligence...more