Inside Job Transcript - Final Version - 9.30.10 - Sony Pictures Classics

Inside Job transcript – Sony Pictures – September 2010 23
And linking them all together was the securitization food chain, a new system which
connected trillions of dollars in mortgages and other loans with investors all over the
world.
01:27:34.12
REP. BARNEY FRANK: Thirty years ago, if you went to get a loan for a home, the
person lending you the money expected you to pay him or her back. You got a loan
from a lender who wanted you to pay him back. We've since developed securitization,
whereby the people who make the loan are no longer at risk if there is a failure to repay.
01:27:51.21
NARRATOR: In the old system, when a homeowner paid their mortgage every month,
the money went to their local lender. And since mortgages took decades to repay,
lenders were careful.
In the new system, lenders sold the mortgages to investment banks. The investment
banks combined thousands of mortgages and other loans — including car loans, student
loans, and credit-card debt — to create complex derivatives, called collateralized debt
obligations, or CDOs. The investment banks then sold the CDOs to investors.
Now, when homeowners paid their mortgages, the money went to investors all over the
world.
01:28:33.11 The investment banks paid rating agencies to evaluate the CDOs, and
many of them were given a AAA rating, which is the highest possible investment grade.
This made CDOs popular with retirement funds, which could only purchase highly rated
securities.
01:28:50.05 This system was a ticking time bomb. Lenders didn't care anymore about
whether a borrower could repay, so they started making riskier loans. The investment
banks didn't care, either; the more CDOs they sold, the higher their profits. And the
rating agencies, which were paid by the investment banks, had no liability if their ratings
of CDOs proved wrong.
01:29:17.11
{GILLIAN TETT
U.S. MANAGING EDITOR
THE FINANCIAL TIMES}
GILLIAN TETT: You weren't gonna be on the hook; and there weren't regulatory
constraints. Um, so it was a green light to just pump out more and more and more
loans.