THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

One of the key players in the crap mortgages to AAA securities scam is talking to the New York AG Andrew Cuomo. This should be fun.

Clayton, a publicly held company and the nation’s largest provider of mortgage due diligence services to investment banks, communicated daily with bankers putting together mortgage securities.

As part of the deal, Clayton has told the prosecutors that starting in 2005, it saw a significant deterioration of lending standards and a parallel jump in lending exceptions. In an another sign that the industry was becoming less careful, some investment banks directed Clayton to halve the sample of loans it evaluated in each portfolio, a person familiar with the investigation said.

The mortgage business boomed from 2002 to 2006, generating lucrative fees for mortgage brokers, lenders, credit rating firms, investment banks and many investors. Investment banks began buying billions of dollars of more risky loans made to borrowers with blemished, or subprime, credit histories and packaging them into securities that paid high interest....

...The investment banks then pooled the mortgages into securities, often by blending loans from different lenders. Information on those mixed pools was then delivered to the rating agencies, which assigned the securities a score. Pension funds and other big investors bought them because they had triple-A ratings.

But investment banks did not give the rating agencies their due diligence reports, and it appears that the agencies did not demand them, people familiar with Mr. Cuomo’s investigation said.

In January 2007, Clayton briefed at least one credit rating agency about the exception reports it was producing, the person involved in the agreement said, but the credit firm did not ask to see the reports.

"If only we had known", but then they would not have been able to sell any of that crap. So they turned a blind eye to the profit machine until it all blew up. With help from Clayton, maybe the buck will make a few stops on Wall St.