liar loans

The mortgage-backed securities meltdown whose effects still haunt our economy sprang from a simple cause: The rules of the game gave big incentives to every player involved to ignore the problems and keep collecting their fees. And despite financial reform, those rules haven't changed much.

There is one surefire way to reinvigorate the housing industry and it's such a simple solution that regulators should be embarrassed they have to be reading about it here: Re-institute the liar loan. In polite circles, these loans were called stated income loans or "no doc" -- short for "no...

For a brief heady period, freelancers and the other self-employed folks found it easy to secure a mortgage: all that borrowers with a reasonably good credit score had to do was write in their income and swear with all the power of their own signature that, indeed, that was what they made. Also...

A UCLA professor has come up with a wild idea to help prevent the next financial meltdown. He doesn't propose expensive regulations and mechanisms of enforcement on financial actors. Instead, he suggests that swift and decisive punishment of the biggest instigators of financial mayhem could scare...