Forrest Gump explains mortgage backed securities....
Mortgage Backed Securities are like boxes of chocolates. Some crooks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stole some chocolates from their boxes and replaced them with turds. Their criminal buddies at Standard & Poor rated these boxes AAA Investment Grade chocolates. These boxes were then sold all over the world to investors. Eventually somebody bites into a turd and discovers the crime. Suddenly nobody trusts American chocolates anymore - worldwide, and some bigwigs on Wall Street go belly-up.
Hank Paulson now wants the American taxpayers to buy up and hold all these boxes of turd-infested chocolates for $700 billion dollars until the market for turds returns some day....
Meanwhile, the criminals (i.e., Congressmen: Dodd, Schumer, Franks, etc.) who forced laws on Wall Street to make them finance turds just like they were good chocolates, are not being investigated, arrested, indicted, or even disciplined for ultimately crashing the U.S. financial system, and now the entire global economy.
Well, Mama always said: "Sniff the chocolates first, Forrest!"
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