Banks and financing companies began to offer subprime mortgage loans and induced low income families to purchase houses by waiving principal payments for the first few years.

银行和金融公司开始提供次级住房贷款，第一年零首付，使低收入家庭也能购买房子。

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So investment banks took their enormous capital and at first packaged yield-enhanced, subprime mortgage loans into complex derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).

因此投资银行斥巨资提高了首次包装上市的水平，并把次级抵押贷款放到了诸如债务抵押债券（CDOs）等复杂金融衍生品上。

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That fear ran down a few spines on February 7th, when HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, revealed that bad loans at its American subprime mortgage division were 20% higher than expected.

2月7日，欧洲第一大银行汇丰银行透露其美国次优房贷部门的不良贷款比预期多了20%，这加剧了人们的恐慌。

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Thousands more Americans may lose their homes soon, this time to a wave of high-interest subprime mortgage loans.

NPR: NAACP Seeks a Moratorium on Sub-prime Foreclosures

"In view of how the laws of probability have yet to be repealed, a steep jump by subprime mortgage loans share of total mortgage originations from the 9% of 1996 to 2000 to the 21% of 2004 to 2006 practically assured an upward shift in mortgage delinquencies, " wrote Moody's in a report Tuesday.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Beginning with subprime loans, mortgage backed securities proliferated as banks got hooked on quick easy profits and circular valuation models which never took in the possibility of a fall in housing prices.

FORBES: The Negative Effects Of The Treasury's Plan To Sell $142B Worth Of MBS