Author Michael Lewis joins Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and director Adam McKay for a freewheeling conversation on the making of their biting satire about the financial crisis, victim blaming and what happens if The Donald actually makes it into the White House.

Seventy-seven pages into his 2010 best-seller, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, author Michael Lewis stops to congratulate readers with a “gold star” for getting this far. After all, the detailed analysis of the financial-industry machinations that led to the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the Great Recession (and, arguably, the election of President Obama in 2008) is a whirlwind of such headache-inducing terms as collateralized debt obligations and triple-A tranches woven together by the personal stories of the men who foresaw the implosion and made millions. “Nobody wants to read about credit default swaps,” jokes Lewis today. “And nobody wants to…

Mastan v. Salamon (In re Salamon), 528 B.R. 171 (9th Cir. BAP 2015) –

The bankruptcy court disallowed the claim of a deed of trust creditor on the grounds that it was barred by the applicable state anti‑deficiency statute.  The creditor contended that it was entitled to treat its non-recourse loans as recourse loans under the Bankruptcy Code, which trumped the anti‑deficiency statute.

The debtor acquired an apartment building subject to two pre-existing loans secured by the property.  The acquisition was financed by the seller through a “wraparound” note and mortgage, which covered the first two loans, and an additional new loan.

Huffington Post:

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote an article about how workers in a peculiar American industry were beginning to worry about subprime home loans. They were Wall Street lawyers who specialized in a dark financial art called securitization — bundling up assets, such as home mortgages, into bonds for sale to investors.

The financial pipeline supplying the loans was beginning to dry up as more and more people fell behind on their mortgages, the lawyers told me.

It was the beginning of a two-year slide that culminated in the failure of Lehman Brothers and brought the American economy to the brink of collapse.

Like most people, and most journalists, I didn’t see it coming. I wrote my story, then unwisely turned to other topics. I had no idea that the entire mortgage industry was wormed through with rot and disease and fraud, that the mortgage bonds that had…