I read Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance a few months back but never got around to writing about it, but since it’s subject and content are still very relevant to the world at large today I thought I’d jot down a few words about it.

Confessions of a Subprime Lender is written by former subprime mortgage broker Richard Bitner. Bitner got out of the game only a short while before the “shit hit the fan” in 2007 because of his growing concern that the market conditions that had been enacted by the subprime market did not make any sense at all.

In the book Birtner doesn’t go into too much detail about the underlying process of subprime lending but he does explain the basics of how the lending worked and how it changed from it’s inception in 2000 to it’s ultimate demise in 2007. It’s a really interesting read where you learn that the whole subprime lending industry actually could have worked and did to some degree back when it started but it was the lack of regulation that caused it to eat up everything in it’s way when it fell together in 2007 and continues to eat up our economy now and well into 2010/2011.

This is a great book to learn about one of the things that caused our current economic situation. The book is a short read of less than 200 pages and available for around £4 on Amazon marketplaces or at any decent library so there is no reason not to read it. Also put a short interview with Richard Bitner on the Daily Show below:

Related posts from the blog:

• Subprime Debt Values in a Recession
• The Big Short
• When Markets Collide
• The Call of Cthulhu
• Fooled By Randomness