Panel exposes players in financial crisis

"One of the principal perpetrators in the FCIC's account are the huge investment firms such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers that chopped up mortgages and recombined them into mortgage-backed securities, which they then sold to investors. One of their favorite tricks was to package highly rated prime mortgages with riskier subprime loans to create collateralized debt obligations which would then get higher ratings from ratings agencies, the report says"