Lloyd Blankfein

Sure.

You know, it's easy.

Look, anything that's resolved, nobody ever remembers not knowing it.

So everybody knows that the mortgage, you know, that mortgages were, you know, junk securities were bad.

And, you know, a lot of them never, you know, turned out to be worth zero at the time.

Some people thought it and other people thought the opposite, but nobody, nobody really knew.

It's only in hindsight that people knew.

By the way, every time somebody tells me they know something, I ask them about something that's current.

As you say, it's current.

And so in that particular thing, you know, at those times we had somebody who wanted to go short the mortgage market and we had plenty of people who wanted to go because at that point they were very high yielding securities.

And by the way, there was not widows and orphans on either side of the transactions.

It was

a big institution on the other side of it.

And it was plucked up as an example of some of the things that we did.

So there was a very well-informed institution that was dedicated to holding mortgage obligations.

By the way, mortgages are securities.

It's like a security that's a version of a bank holding a mortgage.

So it's just owning people's homes.

And if people are going to default on paying off their home mortgage, those securities could become worthless.

So people were betting that those securities would go back up in value and other people were betting that they would go down in value.