Becuase they can short and/or insure their own loans if the insurance and/or short is in danger of becoming more profitable than the potential loan loss.

This, however, requires that the sucker who is on the other end of the deal hasn't done his risk analysis properly.

Which really speaks more to the need for keeping widows and orphans out of the capital markets than to any need to rein in the capital markets' tendencies to separate suckers from their money. Because the former is possible - the latter may very well not be.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.