Cutting financial regulations also allowed for increased refinancing to access home equity , which meant that lenders like Countrywide Financial , Citibank , Wells Fargo and Chase Bank offered subprime mortgages to people who could n't afford the increasing interest rates and defaulted , causing the subprime mortgage crisis , which led to the global financial crisis . Moore meets with an ex-Countrywide employee , whose job it was to give prominent politicians , regulators and financiers cheap mortgages and discounted loans . He then meets William K. Black , who was a central figure in exposing Congressional corruption during the Savings and loan crisis , who tells Moore that the FBI was investigating mortgage fraud but had its priorities changed after the September 11 attacks , leading to white-collar crime going unpunished . Black compares the financial crisis to the failure of a dam : slowly at first , with a little failure that stretches back years , that ultimately ends in a sudden catastrophe . He also reports that bank executives and former politicians and regulators , like Robert Rubin , Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner , were the ones who profited financially from this , after changes in the law that allowed commercial banks to get into investment banking , hence the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group
September 11 attacks
September 11 attacks
Capitalism: A Love Story