I read an article about this kind of thing in last summer. It was about the housing boom finally hitting the wall and the stocks associated with them followingclosely behind on the coat tails. Basically, what happened is that all these loans started floating around and being sold and bought, sold and bought, so on and so forth. Without a single penny of real money actually ever being exchanged. Just like the treasury does when there is not enough money, they just started printing more. Or in this case, giving out more loans and trying to get what little money they were actually going to get out of the folks who were obviously going to default. You would have better luck trying to get ahead on payday loans from money tree.