It has been called the sub-prime mortgage crisis, not the Freddy Mac crisis (for instance). The problem was with a class of products, not with individual lenders.

At the rate this crisis is spreading, it's a problem with pretty much all lenders. Worse, the crisis is spreading well outside of the subprime arena. The biggest threat looming out there now is that a lot of those supposedly prime massive mortgages in markets like California are going to default. At $500,000 a mortgage and up, on properties that in many cases are now worth less than the value of the mortgage, we're talking serious money.

Banks weren't just making financially unsound loans in the subprime market - they were making them up and down the line. That's because all property values were inflated by these shady lending practices. As the home price bubble continues to unwind the full magnitude of this crisis is going to become clearer. It may have started in the subprime market, but it'll spread to the Alt-A loans (which typically went to folks with good credit who were trying to buy way more home than they could afford) until eventually we'll see major losses on prime loans as well (especially if unemployment ticks up much for higher-end white collar workers, and folks are forced to relocate and/or can't keep up with their massive monthly payments).

All of the blather about derivatives spreading out the risks assumes the loans weren't completely fraudulent to begin with. Which, in fact, hundreds of thousands of them were. People lied about their income, usually at the encouragement of a broker trying to meet his monthly sales quota. Homes had their values inflated by fraudulent appraisals. Home improvement refi loans were made, and the money spent on widescreen tee vees and fishing boats. Bizarre financial instruments were invented, like the interest only, no money down, stated income, adjustable rate loan, designed to get any janitor into a $500,000 cardboard California condominium.

Anybody with even a casual familiarity with the mortgage business knew there was no experience with products like this, and hence no way to accurately assess the actual risk of the loans being bundled and sold off by the billions. There was clearly fraud going on - look at the trouble loan scamsters Ameriquest got into several years ago. Any idiot should have been able to see that many of these loans were complete garbage, and that the mid to longterm performance of these newfangled instruments was a complete unknown.

That didn't stop the high holy market from valuing these debt septic tanks as if they were full of ambrosia, though. Now we're all soaking in the banksters raw sewage. Welcome to the libertarian paradise, a cesspit of unregulated capitalism. Tasty, no?

It doesn't trouble me that Pullman kills 'God' in his book (since his god looks nothing like the real one)

And what does this real God look like, exactly? Cause it seems to me religious people have been slaughtering religious people for centuries over assertions of what God really looks like, and no two cults seem to fully agree on that picture.

Hitler advocated Christianity, thus Christianity is bad?

No, but good job blodrying a strawman with a lot of hot air.

Try, "Hitler advocated Christianity, thus clearly not everybody who advocates Christianity is moral (or even sane)."

Millions died in the name of atheism.

Bullcrap. Stalin wiped out anyone he perceived as a threat to his power, regardless of their religion. Those victims died in the name of Stalin, not "atheism". Same with Mao and the lunatics who followed him. These guys were totalitarian amoral nutjobs who used terror to build a cult of personality which secured their rule. Their crimes had diddly squat to do with atheism.

Atheism will do nothing to protect you from monsters like Stalin, but then neither will religion - just look at Hitler, or for that matter the democratically-elected fruitcakes in charge of Iran. I won't even bother to mention what a catastrophe the church sanctioned and supported governments of Europe were from the Dark Ages clear thru the Industrial Revolution. If that bunch of zealots had access to the kind of military technology Hitler and Stalin possessed, they probably would have exterminated all life on earth.