re: #582 Gus 802

Looking at the figures and it looks like 18% of the subprime mortgages went to blacks with 5% towards conventional loans.

Lower income people were disproportionately targeted for subprime loans, and disproportionately unlikely to understand the risks.

But many people got swept up in the madness. I don’t know if people saw this article in the NYT magazine section in May, but it’s horribly fascinating:

If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.

But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others — borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them — I just thought I could beat the odds.

My Personal Credit Crisis