Wednesday, May 19, 2010

We've Been Subprime For A Very Long Time

From the beginning, the press got the housing bubble/foreclosure crisis completely wrong, seeing it simply as a problem of 'subprime' (read: nasty poor people) borrowers, when in fact it was obviously a problem for the entire housing market. Borrowers with worse credit scores were having problems first, both because they had less of a cushion and because many were victims of extreme predatory and fraudulent lending practices, but it was obvious long ago that that it wasn't just a problem for the nasty poor people.