The Roots of the Lending Crisis Run Through Wall Street

By Nomi Prins, The Nation
Posted on December 9, 2007, Printed on December 10, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70096/

Behind every great bubble and its subsequent bust lies the power of Wall Street's trading operations. In the case of our national housing market saga and toxic subprime fallout, it's true that banks and specialist lending institutions rapaciously extended credit to ill-equipped borrowers.

But that's not the whole story. Housing value fluctuations weren't just caused by lending run amok, but by the trading that enabled the lending and made a precarious situation even worse.