Reply #12: Many of the principle players in the mortgage bubble were not banks

[FarCenter]

Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, CountryWide, GE Capital, Golden West, IndyMac, WaMu, GMAC, AIG, CIT and others were either investment banks only, or they were thrifts, or they were non-bank financial institutions.

None of the above were banks before the end of 2008 when they had either been merged into banks under the urging of the US Government in order to rescue them or had converted at least part of their corporation to a bank in order to access the Federal Reserve discount window to get loans.

Citigroup was really the only go-go player in the mortgage market during the bubble, and wholesaled a lot of mortgages into bad mortgage backed securities.

The JP Morgan investment bank did securitization, but mainly Chase and ex Bank One mortgages. The bad stuff in their portfolio mainly comes from Bear Stearns and WaMu.

Bank of America's bad stuff is mostly from CountryWide and Merrill Lynch.

Wells Fargo's bad stuff is mostly from Golden West via the Wachovia Merger, although both they and BofA have extra losses from having large operations in non-recourse mortgage states like CA, AZ, NV and FL.