This is an odd way of framing it (the NBER article isn't quite so slanted). If you were leveraged in 2008 you were more likely have (on paper) a high credit sc

This is an odd way of framing it (the NBER article isn't quite so slanted). If you were leveraged in 2008 you were more likely have (on paper) a high credit score (with assets far in excess of liabilities). But you were also going to get hammered, and be more likely to hit a cashflow wall. If you had a job, one house, and one loan, you probably weathered the storm. It's a little odd to frame that as "poor" vs. "investors," though. The anecdote that always struck me from Lewis's Big Short was that toward the end, lenders were pushing recent immigrants to start no-money-down rental empires, because recent immigrants haven't been here long enough to have credit hiccups -- so they start with high credit scores, even at modest incomes. And for every high credit score loan, the CDOs could launder multiple C-grade loans into a AAA security. The systemic problem was bad securitization math, which led to unsustainable returns in housing investments. A significant element of that was enticing average Joes to over-leverage themselves like "investors." (The idea that Community Reinvestment Act lending was anything as systemic as the rating errors is totally bogus, as far as I can tell).