by Wayne Bereman

Created on: June 02, 2009

I'm a former sub prime underwriter, which gave me a view of the internal financial information of thousands of people and families. Sometimes I think I knew more about my borrowers than they knew about themselves. Many people blame borrowers of subprime real estate loans as the cause of the problem. But let me give some perspective here from my own experience, subprime borrowers are not subprime people.

I have become very tired of hearing know it all commentators on television, most of whom have never been on this side of the news desk, talking about these ignorant borrowers that were over leveraged and speculators flipping homes causing this crisis".

I think we need a more balanced view, and a bit of perspective about the systemic issues causing this crisis.

I'm making the argument here that the macro forces causing this panic are unfair, poorly managed trade agreements that favor only multinational corporate balance sheets, and not our nation, and loose monetary policy that is causing tremendous inflation (an increase in the amount of currency in circulation). Both of which are the effect of massive greed.

In the micro, the problem was a culture of greed throughout the production chain in the mortgage business, from the borrowers all the way to the securitization market.

So yes, there is a problem with the average Joe that is using his home as a credit card, but this is not the place to lay blame and then walk away. When Congress spends more money than they take in year after year to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, should we expect families to do differently? When our government under-funds social security, should we expect the people to focus on their own retirement? When we as a nation consume hundreds of billions of dollars more of products made overseas than those made here (this is a credit arrangement; the trade deficit is paid for by future generations of Americans), should we expect families not to run their credit cards up too? When our corporations get caught defrauding their investors (Enron ring a bell) should we expect borrowers and brokers to be honest on that loan application?

Our leaders have led us down this path; you cannot expect anything different than what we have.

But the truth is, most of the sub prime borrowers I saw were good people attempting to do what is right. In each application it became apparent if the borrower has always been risky, or if some event took place that shattered their credit, perhaps

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