If you’ve been following the saga of the US housing crash, one can’t help but realize Wall Street played a critical role in the rise and fall of the US housing market.  The fact is there was mortgage fraud up and down the line from Wall Street to wholesalers to mortgage brokers to end consumers.

Now the Feds are charging Goldman with fraud regarding the packaging and sale of billions of dollars of mortgage backed securities and CDOs.  If you recall when the collapse started in 2008, Goldman was one of the few Wall Street firms that did exceptionally well and that’s because they figured out a way how to short housing or short mortgages.  They made billions.

With all that I have read over the past couple of years of what went on during the boom, I’m beginning to wonder if all of those big firms aren’t just criminal operations.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal story about the fraud charge.  For additional commentary on this story, check out Denninger’s “It’s About Damn Time (Goldman).”