Scientific Visualization

Here is a nice animation to let you take a roller coaster ride through just over a century of house price data gathered by Case Shiller:



As you arrive at the 2000s in this animation keep telling yourself "the Wall Street banks got the ratings agencies to stamp AAA on mortgage-backed securities because the risk modelers data showed that house prices only go up and never down".

Watch the video and then tell me there was no fraud, no crime, on Wall Street when it sold trillions in securitized paper based on these "financially engineered" instruments that blew up and went from AAA-rated to junk status in a matter of months in 2007-8.

I didn't expect George Bush to arrest any of his Wall Street buddies over this crime of the century. But I'm really, really outraged that Barack Obama has decided to shield the financial manipulators of Wall Street from the long arm of the law.

Where is the justice for the tens of millions of Americans whose savings have been cratered, who have lost their homes, and who are now unemployed and will stay unemployed for most of a decade? Where is the justice?