The US justice system never fails to disappoint me. I enjoyed the Money as Debt documentary you linked a while back; it's amazing that these people were essentially printing money left and right, and when the whole mess collapsed, these bad actors never got cleaned up. I suppose part of the reason is that it's hard for simpletons like myself to wrap my head around how these "instruments" work.

The idea of a mortgage makes sense; the homebuyer signs a contract, the bank gives out money and holds on to the deed until either the terms of the contract are repaid and the homeowner is given the deed, or the obligations go unfulfilled, the bank kicks the person out and auctions the deed off. Banks didn't want to sit there for thirty years with this whole contract/deed thing, so they were bundling them up and selling them to other investors/banks so they could have the money without the liability. Now, when people can't pay their mortgage, who owns the deed when these mortgage-backed securities had been resold all over the market? Am I understanding this right? How could they not keep track of this? Why not just outlaw these mortgage-backed securities?