Oh.

Several years ago, a friend of mine left the place we worked to work at her boyfriend's business. He claimed he was making a lot of money. Doing what? Writing mortgages.

Huh?

Then another friend told me he took classes and wrote a mortgage. The job didn't agree with him. so he stopped doing it.

A third person told me they were taking classes on how to write mortgages, and that there was a money back guarantee that this would make the person big money in their spare time. Well, she didn't see it that way, so shortly after her class ended, she went and got her money back.

Do you see the trend here that I did?

The first person stayed with the job even though business took and abrupt downturn. She is never going to see the salary she wasn't paid. We can all see why by now.

I kept wondering what qualified these people to decide on the financial state of the applicants -- how they decided whether the loan was good. Short answer: they could not tell and their decisions most likely generated the instruments that are now being called "subprime". There was a real plague of mortgage writers for awhile. Now I am quite certain that I can guess at how that came to be. I'm also pretty sure that they have disappeared in the current climate.