Description

A page-turning, true-crime expos? of the subprime salesmen and Wall Street alchemists who produced the biggest financial scandal in American history
It s hard to have a guilty conscience if you don t have a conscience. Anything that benefited production – that benefited me and benefited my wallet – I d do it.
The sales force at Ameriquest Mortgage took this philosophy to heart. They watched the Hollywood white-collar-crime flick Boiler Room as a training tape, studying how to pitch overpriced deals to unsuspecting home owners. They learned how to forge signatures on mortgage paperwork and create fake documents in cut-and-paste operations they dubbed The Lab or The Art Department.
In this stunning narrative, award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson reveals the story of the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage business by chronicling the rise and fall of two corporate empires: Ameriquest and Lehman Brothers. As the biggest subprime lender and Wall Street s biggest patron of subprime, Ameriquest and Lehman did more than any other institutions to create the feeding frenzy that emboldened mortgage pros to flood the nation with high-risk, high-profit home loans.
It s a tale populated by a remarkable cast of the characters: a shadowy billionaire who created the subprime industry out of the ashes of the 1980s S&L scandal; Wall Street executives with an insatiable desire for product; struggling home owners ensnared in the most ingenious of traps; lawyers and investigators who tried to expose the fraud; politicians and bureaucrats who turned a blind eye; and, most of all, the drug-snorting, high-living salesman who tell all about the money they made, the lies they told, the deals they closed.
Provocative and gripping, The Monster is a searing expos? of the bottom-feeding fraud and top-down greed that fueled the financial collapse.