| Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis | |
| Author: | Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Subject: | Subprime mortgage crisis |
| Genre: | Non-fiction |
| Publisher: | John Wiley and Sons |
| Release Date: | 2008 |
| Media Type: | Hardcover |
| Pages: | 328 pp. |
| Isbn: | 978-0470292778 |
| Dewey: | 332.7/20973 22 |
| Congress: | HG5095 .M86 2008 |
| Oclc: | 226355971 |
Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis is a 2008 book about the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States by investigative journalists Paul Muolo of National Mortgage News and Mathew Padilla of the Orange County Register.[1] The book has an accompanying website [2] with some excerpts, author biographies and a roundup of events in the subprime mortgage crisis that occurred after the book was printed.
The book analyses the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States in an attempt to assign responsibility for the collapse of a number of mortgage companies in 2007-2008 and for the sharp rise in mortgage defaults in the wake of the sudden tightening of mortgage credit in the summer and early fall of 2007. The authors find that, while blame can be laid at every link of the mortgage production chain (borrowers, brokers, wholesale lenders) the ultimate culprits are Wall Street firms that carelessly securitized mortgage loan pools without appropriate diligence and attention to the quality of the underlying loans.
In 2009 the book was published in Japanese by Nippon-Hyoron-Sha Co., Ltd. under the title サブプライム危機 : 実録. .