Description: This essay examines the root causes of the 2008 global financial crisis precipitated by the bursting of the housing bubble. The author suggests that if fraud is not addressed, future crises, perhaps even worse, will occur.

Description: It is the belief of this author that the subprime mortgage mess was none other than a Ponzi scheme repackaged into 21st century financial engineering clothes. What makes this scheme particularly disastrous is that the 21st century Ponzi mortgages were packaged and sold to investors and then trillions of dollars of derivatives were constructed based on the underlying mortgages, magnifying the problem by orders of magnitude.