I will donate $1000 to the DNC now if someone explains how G-S caused Lehman to fail.

[jsmirman]

55. Wha? I gave it a descriptive title to tell you

what you were looking at.

I gave the link that title, because that topic is extensively discussed in that article.

The beginning of the end, as the Senate's investigation suggests, came in 1999, when WaMu snapped up a subprime lender named Long Beach Mortgage Company. Long Beach was a major player in the booming securitization business—the origination of loans to be bundled into bonds backed by those pools of loans. These mortgage-backed securities were then sold to Wall Street banks and the two government-sponsored housing corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2006, Long Beach injected a staggering $30 billion in subprime loans into the securitization machine, a sixfold increase from only three years before...

This cutthroat, purely profit-driven philosophy meant WaMu and Long Beach increasingly pushed their employees, in the early 2000s, to focus more on volume than quality—selling more and more loans with little regard for the underwriting or potential success of those loans. "WaMu built its conveyor belt of toxic mortgages to feed Wall Street's appetite for mortgage backed securities," Levin said. "To keep the conveyor belt running and feed the securitization machine on Wall Street, Washington Mutual engaged in lending practices that created a mortgage time bomb."

...the pressure to churn out more loans was "tremendous." Salespeople were told to do "whatever it took" to pump out more loans to feed WaMu’s securitization frenzy. "In WaMu's loan business, volume was king," Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), chair of the investigations subcommittee, said... ...The full-steam-ahead mentality to subprime lending, both in WaMu's prime lending operation and Long Beach's subprime machine, inevitably led to shoddier and grossly fraudulent practices within WaMu... The damage, though, had already been done, and both Long Beach and WaMu's prime and subprime assembly line and shoddy lending practices sowed the seeds of the $300-billion bank’s demise...

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/04/washington-mutual-senate-investigation-levin-killinger-failure-autopsy-april-report

There's even more in the rest of the article. Nice empty accusation.