It was the hot trade on Wall Street, a seemingly sure thing that lulled everyone from hedge fund managers to small-time investors……How these investments proliferated is a classic story of Wall Street salesmanship and old-fashioned greed. In a few short years, financial engineering transformed expectations about the ups and downs of the stock market into an asset class that could be marketed and sold — as tradable as stocks but, it turns out, sometimes far riskier.
