Report from Center for Public Integrity - Subprime 25: Who’s Behind the Financial Meltdown ?

On 6 May 2009, Center for Public Integrity has published a investigation report titled :
Who’s Behind the Financial Meltdown – the top 25 subprime lenders and their Wallstreet Backers

This Subprime 25 Interactive List is cool.
You can click on the sheets (#1 to #25) to see name, status of company, its CEO, total high interest loans.
Click on "Read More" for more "interesting" information for e.g history, summary, parent companies, bailout money, political contributions etc..

The Subprime 25
These are the top 25 subprime lenders, responsible for 7.2 million "high interest" loans made from 2005 through 2007 (72% of high-priced loans reported).

The articles and glossary from the report are extremely good reads to understand root causes of the subprime crisis.

The "Data" are informative. (Click on Data)
Maps show regions of high interest loans of different percentage points above treasury securities);
Charts & Graphs are really interesting. There are charts showing increasing % of income goes to housing; increasing financing of Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) and the top underwriters.

Then there are the interesting parts:

• charts showing political contributions by securities and investment companies, real estate companies to parties (Democrats or Republicans) and
• top recipients of contributions by securities and investment companies, real estate companies for 2003-2004 and 2007-2008;
• top recipients of contributions by AIG in 2008 Election Cycle.

Guess who was the top recipient: 2003-2004 George W. Bush; 2007-2008 Barack Obama.
Haha, wonder what the analysts are trying to imply here :-)

I put the Widget of Subprime 25 on my blog for a limited period :-)