Letter written back then still applies

If Mr. Heuberger ("Inept pols caused foreclosure crisis," Sept. 5) can repeat the same old lie - which I am sure he believes - then I can ask for a reprint of a letter that was published in 2010. It was called, "Financial meltdown was not an accident." The following is what I wrote:

What would you think about a car dealership that sells cars with faulty breaks and then takes out life insurance policies on the people who buy them? This is precisely what Wall Street did with their Collateral Debt Obligations (CDO). Wall Street created an incentive program that encouraged agents to make risky loans for the sole purpose of creating an exotic financial instrument that they knew was doomed to fail, just so they could bet against it in the derivative market.

For years the right has been shouting that a law passed in the 1970s, the Community Reinvestment Act was at the heart of the subprime meltdown. The CRA only stopped racial discrimination of loan approvals; it did not force banks to make bad loans. In truth, Wall Street wanted to make bad loans so they could bet against them.

The subprime mortgage crisis was not an unforeseeable accident. It was planned. The very reason why the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 was passed was to pull off this con. The CFMA specifically stated that derivative trading would not be regulated or transparent. The CDOs were engineered to fail so Wall Street could profit by their collapse.

John D. Morgan

Arlington Heights