Trot down to your local bank and tell them they will give you a no money down loan on a 500,000 dollar home and you are making minimum wage. How would that work for you? Yet some dingbats say the people who accepted these loans were at fault. How smart do you have to be to see that is a dumb deal. The banks should have never made the loans available. It was bad business . People took the loans because banks pushed them . The people have no way to force banks to offer stupid loans. banks are supposed to have standards to protect themselves from bad loans. They have committees that rate loans. They all failed because of greed and the idea that they would not keep the loans . They would sell them to someone else immediately. They did not care how bad the loans were. They made money off the transaction and more when they sold it. It was win /win. Of course the economy paid and America was harmed, But make a buck and it is all OK.
The bank should have not allowed the practice. The government regulation should have made such loans impossible. It was greed .
Bernanke slept through it all.
You’re only mistake - it was actually very good business. These crap loans got good interest rates, so the mortgage companies who flimflammed people into taking them got extra money, as did those who sold them. The shuffled them into good loans and got the formulas the rating agencies used, so they could design them to be AAA. The other banks who bought them sold them to investors (AAA, no need to look at the underlying stuff) at a good profit.
Good business until it fell apart - but the people kept their bonuses anyhow.