Preface: Who Really Drove the Economy Into the Ditch? -- Part One: Two governmental policies caused the crisis -- Chapter 1: The Rosetta stone of the subprime lending crisis -- The origin of no-down payment loans -- Lender, Thou Shalt be flexible -- "The government was screaming" for subprime -- The deadly role of Fannie and Freddie -- Alarms were ringing years before the crisis -- Chapter 2: Garbage in, garbage out -- Say "goodbye" to sensible underwriting standards -- F&F pushed the new automated systems with gusto -- Automation and subprime don't mix -- Push enough subprime and some will slip through -- Risky, risk-based pricing -- Fannie and Freddie misconstrued the warning signs -- Conclusion -- Chapter 3: Appraise a house without leaving your seat -- Lending on the basis of Zillow estimates -- The many problems of the Automated Valuation Models -- Needed for appraisals: A Full Monty -- Epilogue -- Chapter 4: A liberal pincer creates a thousand points of blight -- The sound of silence -- It gets worse: Down payments are "gifted" -- What did F&F think of down payment corruption assistance? -- The real reason we lack affordable homes -- Summary -- Chapter 5: Fannie and Freddie fudge their delinquency stats -- Once a crook, always a crook -- Like Sinatra, they did it their way -- What were the real delinquency rates? -- More creative accounting -- Smoke and mirrors -- Epilogue -- Chapter 6: Fannie and Freddie's junk loan orgy -- Paul's Principle, explained -- What are subprime loans? -- The junk loan orgy -- F&F paid top dollar for subprime -- Purchases of subprime were leveraged -- The Fannie and Freddie apologists and their logic errors -- Ed Pinto: A man completely vindicated -- Chapter 7: More subprime promotion by Fannie and Freddie -- Fannie and Freddie promoted brokers over banks -- They got cozy with subprime aggregators.

They were cheerleaders for subprime -- F&F designed the subprime loans of private lenders -- Fannie and Freddie misled the market about subprime -- F&F redefined "conforming" to include subprime -- The GSEs fought predatory lending laws -- A brief history of F&F, subprime, and politics -- Chapter 8: The Community Reinvestment Act (or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) -- What is the Community Reinvestment Act and how did it change? -- The government refuses to produce reliable CRA data -- What is the best estimate of CRA's impact on the crisis? -- What torture teaches us about the CRA -- Chapter 9: Fed policy is a secondary cause of the crisis -- The deflation argument -- Exactly when did the housing bubble start? -- Can the U.S. Federal reserve cause a world-wide bubble? -- Fed policy doesn't affect long-term rates? -- The two bubble factors: monetary policy and subprime -- Epilogue: Transcripts show a clueless Federal Reserve -- Part Two: Resistance to subprime broke down -- Chapter 10: Securitization - Who needs it? -- A brief history of securitization -- Was our 40-year securitization experiment a success? -- Mechanics of mortgage loan securitization -- Securitization is not needed, but it is here to stay -- Conclusion -- Chapter 11: Borrower resistance is hurt by predatory tactics -- Mortgage fraud -- Predatory lending -- Mortgage brokers and nonbanks were responsible for predatory lending -- F&F were indirectly responsible for predatory lending -- Regulatory efforts with respect to predatory lending -- Chapter 12: Were rating agencies victims of the copy machine? -- The two most notorious investments -- The credit rating process was no secret -- The Levin hearings produce useful data - and smoke -- The rating agencies made many mistakes -- A very tepid defense of the rating agencies -- The future of rating agencies.

Chapter 13: The bet that didn't blow up Wall Street? -- What are Credit Default Swaps (CDS)? -- The early controversy regarding CDS, derivatives, and regulation -- Credit Default Swaps and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act -- Are credit default swaps beneficial or harmful? -- Part Three: Sparks that lit the fuse -- Chapter 14: Accountants get blamed - It's great! -- A brief mark-to-market history -- The pros and cons of mark-to-market -- Conclusion -- Chapter 15: The bare truth about naked shorts -- The normal (traditional) short sale -- The naked short sale -- Naked and ugly -- The naked shorts regulatory smack-down -- Regulation SHO and the "Uptick Rule" -- Conclusion -- Part Four: Aggravating factors -- Chapter 16: The fraudulent foreclosure baloney sandwich -- MERS - the system designed to track loan ownership interests -- Real cases that will break your heart -- Common-sense solutions -- The 25 billion solution -- Chapter 17: The truth about bank leverage ratios -- The Consolidated Supervised Entity program -- The drive-by professors -- Did the SEC fail? If so, why? -- Chapter 18: People who walk away from their debts -- Was the nonrecourse lending a cause of the crisis? -- The ethics and psychology of the strategic default -- Nonrecourse lending - bad public policy -- Part Five: Scapegoat politics -- Chapter 19: "Eight years of blah, blah, blah" -- Did broccoli cause the mortgage meltdown? -- The truth about deficits -- Was the problem deregulation, regulation, or something else? -- The mixed record of the Bush Administration -- Class warfare politics -- Conclusion -- Addendum A: Overview -- The dog who did not bark -- Terror by (mid) Night -- "Affordable Gold 100s" - not cigarettes, but nearly as deadly -- Conservative wisdom from … Canada?? -- The government and its advocacy of affordable housing.

They're still pushing deadbeat loans -- The complete model -- Addendum B: Looney logic -- Don't be tricked by a bogus definition of "subprime" -- Affordable housing policies led to high-priced home foreclosures -- Businesses adapt to meet a competitive threat -- Going to Las Vegas with lots of money doesn't help -- Don't be confused by misleading statistics -- Business and liberalism are not mutually exclusive -- A lemon is a lemon, no matter how it is financed -- Bad policy in one decade can cause grief in another -- Index.