Yes but it was helped along in collusion with the government and...:
"The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen," Sylvain Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York, recently told The New York Times. "When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson."
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/01/02/how-goldman-sachs-made-tens-of-billions-from-the-economic-collapse-of-america-in-four-easy-steps/
No need to answer my earlier question, I get it now.
Dan
Disclosure: Even longer on AMMO