Richard Bitner

Judging from the title, I expected a more personal take. Sans a couple mentions of how his personal house catching on fire could be an omen, most of the book focused on understanding the causes and catalysts of the mortgage crisis.

Years from now, I imagine people will still be arguing on the causes and catalysts of the mortgage crisis. It's more complicated probably than any of us normal people can comprehend. This book attempts a balanced and basic course educate the reader. It's a valiant try but ultimately falls short.

(He does quote a John Mauldin a few times in the book who I think does a stronger job of explaining things)

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Perhaps a more apt title for this book would have been Accusations of a Subprime Lender, because it's little more than an attempt by Bitner to absolve himself and others in his profession of their culpability in the Great Recession of 2007. Yes, Bitner does devote a throwaway paragraph or two in the book's opening and conclusion to halfheartedly acknowledging his role in the whole mess, but otherwise, the volume is short on objective analysis (to say nothing of reflection) and long on anecdotes largely selected to demonstrate how subprime lenders (read: Bitner) were really the victims of the whole debacle.

You see, Bitner et al. were just performing a valuable service to society by helping the economically disadvantaged obtain homes of their own. The fault, in Bitner's telling, lies with the selfish, irresponsible borrowers who wished to live beyond their means without paying any consequences, and the greedy, dishonest brokers who felt no compunction about lying to lenders' faces in order to get a mortgage for their clients and thus a nice commission for themselves.

Here's a question: if Bitner knew that fully 65% of all the mortgages he took on from brokers were doctored to make the borrowers seem trustworthy--a statement he makes several times throughout the book--and if he knew that many of the borrowers to whom he gave mortgages would be unable to service them if they experienced even the slightest financial upset--another statement he makes repeatedly--can he really claim to be a victim and not a precipitating factor? Or to put it another way, how much of the $252 million in mortgages Bitner processed during his five years as a subprime lender went to lining his pockets during the housing bubble? How much of the profits of this $19.95 exercise in apologetics and obfuscation are going to line his pockets now that the bubble's burst?

Moreover, Bitner's proposed solutions for this problem--federally-mandated standards for mortgage brokers and property assessors (but not subprime lenders--that would be impractical!) sound a whooole lot like Big Government, to which Bitner is opposed. (Except, one gathers, when it's curtailing someone else's profits.)

There's little about the housing crisis in this book that a reader can't find explained more clearly--and objectively--in the pages of the New York Times or the Economist. Given this, there's precious little reason to waste one's time with Bitner's volume.… (meer)