During the early part of the housing boom I was living in a rowhouse in Philadelphia. Whenever I would venture into the suburbs, I would marvel at all the McMansions cropping up everywhere. Who were the people buying these monstrosities that cost more than a half a million dollars and what were they doing for a living? How could they afford the mortgages, let alone the heating bills? There couldn’t possibly be this many millionaires. I kept asking what was going on. I actually got to the point that I felt like a broken record and had to force myself to stifle my urge to talk about it. Well, it turns out that the whole mortgage industry had gone funky. People didn’t have to prove their income. Weird mortgages were created with balloon payments, allowing people to live in mansions for a few years and then just flip the property for a nice profit. It was every bit the mirage I thought it must be.
And the thing is, the whole thing was so criminal from top to bottom that it kind of defies accountability. Loan originators, assessors, underwriters, rating agencies, investment bankers, mortgage servicers, all engaged in knowing fraud. Some of it was technically legal, but shouldn’t have been legal. But a huge proportion of it was illegal. So many people belong in jail that we’d have to build dozens of prisons to house them.
It’s just astonishing how quickly the ethos of the Bush Crime Family infected this country. And now we’re infected with Palin Syndrome before we could even recover from our last malady.