Oct. 20: This text has been corrected.

As we reported last month with NPR’s Planet Money, in the two years before the meltdown Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history. As part of our story, we wrote of 85 instances during 2006 and 2007 in which two CDOs bought pieces of each other. The trades enabled the completion of $107 billion worth of CDOs and underscore the extent to which the market lacked real buyers.

  • Click on a CDO to see the other CDOs it swapped unsold pieces with.
  • Click on an underwriting bank, for example Merrill Lynch, to see which banks’ CDOs had cross-ownership.
  • Click on the bank tab to get a sense of how many instances of cross-ownership there were for any given bank. (Or see them all.)

Related Post:Which CDOs and Banks Had Deals With the Most Cross-ownership?

Download the data behind the chart.


Source: Thetica Systems

Contributors

  • Jeff Larson

    Jeff Larson was a reporter at ProPublica.

  • Karen Weise

    Karen Weise was an intern at ProPublica and a recipient of the Mark Felt Scholarship for Investigative Reporting at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

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