A New York Times reporter has traced the sale of just one of the weirdo investments that blew up on Wall Street and helped cause the mess we're in right now.

Here's the scoop: Bear Stearns came up with an investment package called "Bear Stearns Alt A Trust 2006-7" that was valued at $1.3 billion. Basically, they went out and bought more than 2,000 Alt A (liar's loan) mortgages with the average price tag being $450,000. More than half of the loans were made in the bubble states!

Then Bear Stearns took the trust and divided it into 37 different bonds that they split off for sale to investors. So what you had was a situation in which nobody knew how many loans failed; how many were going to fail going forward; and nobody knew how to value these investments. That's why there's so much confusion in the economy.

This scenario was played out over and over again. One person takes a mortgage; it morphs, moves in pieces and slices to investors around the world; and is structured, divided and repackaged. By the time the investments were sold and re-sold and re-sold again -- and then the foreclosures start -- you have a mess that nobody can define or figure how to put a price tag on.