If 3 times is a trend…
Then what do we call 272,171? If you’re Rachel Lucas, you see 1 in every 464 American households as idiots.
If you’re a bit smarter, though, or at least a bit better educated, you start to wonder at the structural issues. What you might wonder what would cause so many hundreds of thousands of people to make the same mistake all at the same time? . And then you start digging into the history of the mortgage industry and find this picture:
(image stolen from Brad DeLong)
Oh. It seems we used to have regulations that prevented these loans. And then we didn’t. And then the loans got bad. And now we have foreclosures. Must just be 200,000 isolated cases of idiocy, then. It’s certainly not the fault of the bankers…