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SUPER SENIOR….Looking for more financial geekery? Sure you are! The other day I asked Felix Salmon to explain super senior tranches for us, and today he obliges. It’s too complicated to excerpt, but the nickel version is that it became yet another way for banks to increase their exposure to subprime loans by creating a synthetic version of the subprime market that was even bigger than the original. So instead of merely idiotically missing the housing bubble and losing lots of money on supposedly safe subprime-backed CDOs, they idiotically doubled (tripled? quadrupled? who knows) their bet by creating lots of synthetic subprime CDOs and then keeping them on their own books instead of selling them off. When the crash came, then, they lost money on both the real stuff and the synthetic stuff.

The full story is here. Enjoy!

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And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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