So people loved the index and its numbers, and did not examine its underlying logic too closely. New paper was valuable in itself, especially when rated high by the rating agencies, who had such usefully short memories, like everyone else in finance, when it came to their own absurdly terrible judgment, so the ratings still mattered as a rubber stamp of legitimacy, ridiculous though that was given their history as a service bought by the very people they were rating. So now as always you could get AAA ratings, not for subprime mortgages, obviously bad, but for submarine mortgages, clearly much
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