What according to the passage is the crux of the matter?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
Without getting carried away by the wide-eyed protestations of innocence by the modern day Shylocks, there is increasingly lesser doubt that banks have been complicit in precipitating the present imbroglio and what’s more, the trail of evidence points towards sins not only of omission, which can be perhaps taken lightly, but explicit sins of commission which cannot be taken lightly. There is also perhaps an increasingly evident undercurrent of resentment against the money lenders within large sections of the population because even though the banks have almost certainly planted the nation head first in this bog of fiscal quagmire, so far they have been appearing to be getting away almost scot-free for their misdemeanors.
That could change pretty soon if the picture emerging from the darkness of the shadows of banking, mortgage sellers, buyers and evaluators is true, and, from the looks of it, it seems that the case is pretty water-tight. The regulators have smelt something fishy and have gone in for in-depth investigation and no, this is not the same as the sub-prime mortgage quicksand but a spin-off of the same with deeper legal ramifications. Despicable, as it may seem, banks are well within their rights to lend to sub-prime borrowers and to go in for foreclosure when regulatory obligations are fulfilled. What cooks the goose is the fact that many home mortgage lenders have resold the loans that they had granted to third and fourth parties through a bidding process. The loans are clubbed together in a common document which contains the salient characteristics of each loan. The document is then circulated and the loans are sold to the highest bidder. In the current rip-off, the successful bidders evidently got the loans evaluated during the due diligence period and found that many of the loans sanctioned by the primary lender did not pass muster the benchmark and the guidelines set by the merchant himself and instead of bringing it to the notice of the concerned regulators, they preferred to negotiate for lower purchasing prices with the merchant. The howler was that the secondary buyers did not bring the material information, which could have and would have affected the decision of the investors to park their money in these assets, to the notice of the investors who were buying into these loans and now we have a situation where everyone involved has tried in some manner or the other to keep the next link in the chain in the dark. Here we are, with loans granted without due diligence, being sold to investors who don’t have complete information about the same. Had it been based on pure ethical considerations, it might have slid past with just a rap on the knuckles for the offenders but something’s got to give in here.