Dana El-Kurd

So I think it's so much worse.

So that's what like the leveraged part of that.

I don't even know how you do that in burgers.

I don't know.

You're going into debt to, like, buy the promise of burgers in the future so you can sell those future burgers?

Yeah, but burgers are real.

We're not talking about a real thing at all.

Well, technically speaking, somewhere at the bottom of this is mortgages.

However, comma, we're about to get into a kind of asset where there isn't anything behind it.

And this is where the really, really, truly unhinged shit starts.

It hasn't yet?

Which is that these companies figured out a way to bet on whether these mortgages were going to fail or not.

By the way, I can't emphasize enough how unhinged this is.

The mechanism they're using to do this is called a credit default swap.

Oh, I've heard that phrase.

This was supposed to be how they did insurance.

Their mechanism for doing insurance on all of these insane loans they were doing was originally like...

Okay, so you have a bank, right?

The bank has given out a risky loan.

So this bank goes to another bank.