Confessions of a Subprime Lender by Richard Bitner
January 15th, 2009Title: Confessions of a Subprime Lender
Author: Richard Bitner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Books (2008)
Here’s why the mortgage mess happened: If you had a Target credit card with a $100 maximum limit and four collection accounts you met the minimum limit for a mortgage. But get this..if you also had a credit score of 580 (considered very low) you qualified for 100% financing! 100% financing!! That is craziness.
Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud, & Ignorance by Richard Bitner sets out to explain why the mortgage meltdown took place. The author was president and co-founder of a subprime mortgage company. He saw the direction that the industry was going and got out. I suppose that makes him one of the few subprime lenders who is not evil. Or maybe he is evil and just got out at the right time. I’d like to think the former.
The book goes into a lot of detail on how mortgages are established and the reasons that people got into trouble. Basically, as I’m sure you have heard at this point, people took out loans that were more than they could afford. Sometimes the lender “nudged” them in that direction for their own benefit. Most of the time the lender relaxed his standards in order to qualify the borrower for ANY loan. I think there is plenty of blame to go around though as the borrowers should not have gotten themselves in the situation in the first place!
This book started out really interesting for me as it explained what happened. Unfortunately it started to slow down for me and was difficult to finish. The information seems pretty solid…I think I was just a bit overwhelmed at the sheer quantity. All in all…a pretty decent book.
Luckily…the mortgage problems will disappear once the $1 billion bailout starts to take effect. Government spending fixes everything!
Right?
Rating: 3 out of 5
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January 17th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I wonder where all those people got the idea to go after borrowing over their heads. Is the trouble really limited to the greed and studipity of the lenders?
January 20th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Wait, a sub prime lender wrote a book explaining how he and his ilk brought down the American economy? Is he donating all of his profits to charity????
January 28th, 2009 at 6:13 am
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