They also secretly placed even larger bets against the CDOs using an instrument called a 'credit default swap' - essentially insurance on a corporate loan. The securities were made up of subprime-mortgage-based bonds bundled with mortgage securities - and banks were more than happy to get rid of them.Īt the same time, Magnetar pushed for risky investments to go inside those CDOs. In 20, Magnetar created and repackaged a series of complicated and risky financial securities - called collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. economy tanked, Bernstein and Eisinger discovered that the hedge fund made a vast fortune by betting against the market. In 2007, a suburban Chicago hedge fund named Magnetar seemed to outsmart the rest of the financial industry. Planet Money: Bet Against The American Dream And some of them did it just to keep the machine doing it and make huge bonuses.'Įisinger and his colleague Jake Bernstein recently received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of stories about the banks and hedge funds engaged in questionable financial practices that contributed to the near-collapse of the nation's financial system. Some of them did it because they could make fees by helping clients who were betting against it. 'Some of them did it because they could bet against it. 'Lots of bankers knew that things were in trouble, and they went on - they did it anyway,' says ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisenger. economy while it was happening - and then made vast fortunes by betting against the markets. In 20, several banks and hedge funds realized what was happening to the U.S. The cartoon explains how bankers used collateralized debt obligations to fuel 2008's financial meltdown. ProPublica published a cartoon titled ' Welcome to CDO World' to accompany Eisinger and Bernstein's reporting.

Betting against the house is gambling