Ripping off poor people with Wall Street money - sound familiar?

LAT reporter Ken Bensinger has an interesting (but way too long) look at how unscrupulous car dealers are taking advantage of low-income folks. Of particular note is how these ripoff artists are being financed with Wall Street money - and sometimes through securitization methods. Yep, just as was done with mortgages. From the series:

Loans on decade-old clunkers are being bundled into securities, just as subprime mortgages were a few years ago. In the last two years, investors have bought more than $15 billion in subprime auto securities. Although they're backed mainly by installment contracts signed by people who can't even qualify for a credit card, most of these bonds have been rated investment grade. Many have received the highest rating: AAA. That's because rating firms believe that with tens of thousands of loans lumped together, the securities are safe even if some of the loans prove worthless. Some analysts worry that the rush to securitization could lead to careless lending by dealers eager to sell more loans, as happened with many mortgage-backed bonds.

Just in passing: Newspapers should try to eliminate these super-long, multi-part series. They are seldom worth all that space, and I'll bet a few dollars that readership is quite low. Oh, wait: We're just a couple of months from contest season.