By Andrew L. Jaffee

Sell crap disguised as gold, then obfuscate when caught? The current sub-prime mortgage meltdown on Wall Street is sounding a lot like the dot-com bubble — as do all financial bubbles when they finally pop. What happened in the 2007 version of the Party-Like-Its-1999 fiasco? People with bad or marginal credit took out loans to buy homes they couldn’t afford. Banks/lenders relaxed their standards to facilitate these “subprime” loans. Then Wall Street firms like Merrill Lynch and Citigroup bundled up these loans as mortgage-backed securities and sold them as “investments.” The result? “$900 billion in now-suspect securitized debt.” That’s nine hundred billion dollars, a real threat to our whole economy. Just as Wall Street put lipstick on worthless dot-com company pigs, they hocked subprime mortgages as (very risky) high-yield investment vehicles — and were not honest about what they were doing. From Fortune:

… Citigroup delayed for more than a week - from Saturday, October 27th until Sunday, November 4th - in announcing material information about the multi-billion-dollar write-downs it expects to record in this quarter. In the more than a week that passed, there were five trading days - October 29th through November 2nd - in which investors buying and selling Citigroup stock did not know that the write-downs were coming. …