Inside the Gleaming, Gruesome World of Wall Street, pre-Crash

The best look I've seen at how the CDO market ballooned and then burst is The Frenzy in the Washington Post. It dissects in gruesome detail one CDO marketed by Merrill Lynch to reveal how completely out of whack things got.

The piece is part of a larger package on the Crash assembled by the Post.

Michael Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald writes about innovation and other big ideas in business for publications like the New York Times, The Economist, Fast Company, Inc. and CIO. He’s worked as a writer or editor at Red Herring, ZDNet, TechTV and Computerworld, and has received numerous awards as a writer and editor. Most recently, his piece on the hacker collective the l0pht won the 2008 award for best trade piece from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He was also a 2007 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion.

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