"I think you can appreciate why the housing mess will not resolve for several more years. Prime mortgages have been sliced and diced and repackaged endlessly with subprime in order to raise the ratings on the entire pool, then these packages have been sold, repackaged, sold, repackaged, etc. etc.
They can’t even figure out who owns the mortgages anymore because each mortgage has been sliced into parts and repackaged. So there is nobody you can go to in order to re-negotiate your mortgage. It is like trying to renegotiate the value of your shares of GE with the owners. There are millions of shareholders, so who do you talk to?"
For an insider view of things from the standpoint of the participants on all sides, listen to the Giant Pool of Money, when you have time, it’s about an hour (click on "full episode" on the left of the page).
