The paper has tried to analyze whether Wall Street securitization agents were aware of the process of securitization that was about to generate a national financial crisis and still continued to securitize mortgage loans of dubious quality. This has been done by studying personal home transactions of Wall Street midlevel employees in the mortgage securitization business. This has been done by testing a full awareness hypothesis wherein the agents avoided losses in their own homes. The personal home transaction history of a sample group of securitization investors and issuers was compared against two uninformed control groups who had no private information about housing and securitization markets and the two groups were tested on two forms of full awareness. The results showed that the securitization agents were not aware of a housing bubble and impending crash in their own home transactions. (63 refs.)
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