The Mortgage Crisis, a view from the trenches

At least supposedly. It is a comment from a reader of AOL.com who is responding to Jon Stewart's rant against John Santelli and CNBC. Here it is in its entirely:

I worked as a mortgage underwriter for over a decade. I can assure you that in the best of companies, fewer than 5 and often as few as Zero people ever "look over" a loan for credit worthiness. A reputable loan officer might pay attention to these details, a processor should and the underwriter specializes in it. Unfortunately there is no required training or educational level required for any of these positions. With a bachelors degree from an Ivy League University I was grossly overqualified. I was the sole signature required to lend approximately a quarter billion dollars annually on behalf of a major US Bank. Most in my position had no more than a high school education. Even that level of education and human review was removed as more and more loans were approved not by humans, but by automated underwriting systems. As an underwriter I watched the computer approve hundreds of loans whose credit or income were beyond what any human would even consider approving. Perhaps you will have some luck in collecting the lost funds from a computer. I doubt it. I firmly believe that the crisis, in large part, was caused by this abandoning of human review in favor of flawed computer models.

There you have it. What really caused the mortgage crisis.

It was a computer error.

what worries me is this actually makes some sense.

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