This is deconstructed. I'm Ryan Grimm. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've seen the movie or read the book The Big Short. If you haven't, the fact that you were alive in 2008 means you know the gist of the story.

Wall Street bankers packaged and sold garbage loans that eventually blew up the global economy, ruining millions of lives in the process and fueling the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism around the world.

Other than Teresa Judice, star of the Bravo TV show Real Housewives of New Jersey and her husband Joe, basically nobody went to prison for any of it.

Real Housewives getting a bitter taste of reality, a judge sentencing both Teresa and Joe Judice to prison for fraud.

In announcing their indictment, US Attorney Paul Fishman got cute. Everyone has an obligation to tell the truth when dealing with the courts, paying their taxes and applying for loans or mortgages.

That's reality, he said. Pathetic as that joke at their expense was, his claim was also a lie. Everyone did not, in fact, have an obligation to tell the truth.

Wall Street executives had gotten fabulously wealthy and they run up to the financial crisis by lying about those very things and got bailed out when it all went south.

Going after the gaudy judices was about as much as federal prosecutors bothered with, catching them fudging some paperwork the same way millions of others did.

After locking Joe away in solitary confinement, they even deported him back to Italy, where he hadn't lived since he was a little kid.

And since nobody but one real housewife and her now ex-husband paid the price, it's happening again.

Today's show is a bit more technical than I usually do, but even if you get lost in acronyms here and there, the broad outline of the story is sadly quite easy to follow, and it's a fascinating one.

The one guide I'll offer is this one. CNBS stands for Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities. Those are similar to RMBS, which stands for, yes, Residential Mortgage Backed Securities.

During the 2008 crisis, banks bundled together a ton of bad mortgages and created a new asset out of them and claimed that since they were now all bundled together, they were no longer risky, and the rating agencies went along.

Those new assets are called securities, and they were made up of residential mortgages, hence the name, Residential Mortgage Backed Securities, or RMBS.

Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities are exactly what they sound like, they're financial products that are backed not by home loans, but by commercial loans.

The problem in 2008 was the bankers and brokers who were inflating the incomes of people taking out mortgages.

This week, in a story in the intercept, a financial analyst turned whistleblower provided data that bankers appear now to be doing the same for commercial real estate, inflating income and packaging it together into risky assets.

So to recap, RMBS, Residential Securities, the ones you remember from O8, CNBS, Commercial Securities. That's what we're talking about today.

It's an abbreviation that you may end up becoming very familiar with in the not-too-distant future.

I'm joined today by John Schwartz, my colleague who reported this story with me, and John Flynn, the CNBS analyst turned whistleblower who served as our primary source.

What John found, through breathtakingly laborious detective work, is an underbelly of the commercial mortgage market that is a lot softer than we might have thought.

Well, John Flynn, welcome to Deconstructed. Thank you.

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