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In the land of zero privacy the banks weren't able to figure out if an individual would be able to pay back a loan? Or they didn't want to?

• goodcanadian 8y ago
  They didn't care. They were selling the loans on to other institutions which in turn were repackaging them and selling them on and so on and so forth. In the end, it was often unclear who was left holding the bag. The banks, for the most part, were being rewarded for originating loans that they weren't going to hold, so they had perverse incentives to loan as much money as they could. There was massive fraud throughout the system from the the borrowers to the mortgage agents to the banks to the re-packagers (other bigger financial institutions, usually) to the credit agencies. It was a total shit show all around.