Edmund L. Andrews

It’s a good hook: economic reporter for the New York Times finds himself with a no-doc mortgage eating up his savings and endangering his marriage, because he was just as willing to take risks, hoping everything would work out, as the people he wrote about. He blames himself, but also the mortgage brokers willing to write ridiculous loans and the financial firms securitizing risk so that nobody in the chain had any incentive to care about whether people could pay these loans back—the big firms had the ability to appreciate the risks, but they thought they could just transfer those risks to someone else. As we now know, they couldn’t. Andrews isn’t particularly sympathetic—less so than he even thinks, probably, since he comes off like a guy who isn’t a physical abuser only because he manages to limit himself to emotional abuse and occasional violence against household items—but it’s hard to fault his point that as between borrowers and lenders we shouldn’t focus our disapproval on the borrowers, and we should be concerned that the lenders are getting bailouts without having to do anything for borrowers.

Andrews has also come under criticism for not disclosing in the book that his new wife had declared bankruptcy before they got married, which might be related to her—and his!—attitudes towards money as their problems built. They bought their house so that they’d have a big enough place for their combined families, but he was still paying so much alimony and she wasn’t getting the court-ordered child support, so his income didn’t match his actual ability to pay on the new mortgage; and there their troubles began. His personal story is interwoven with an account of how the mortgage crisis built and broke, but if you’ve been reading about this in the papers for a while there’s nothing new here. There is a point at the end where he recounts the evidence that subprime lenders targeted minorities, but he presents the “nondiscrimination” story that minorities were just riskier as about equally plausible—until he meets two (white) women who argue that they got worse loans because of their gender; one of them had essentially the same economic profile as he did and got her loan in the same area at the same time, but got a much, much worse loan, and his eyes were opened to the existence of bias! Well, as they say, let’s not focus on his lateness to the party and be glad that he showed up at all, I guess.… (meer)