Subprime loans were cash out, not purchase

Although not directly related to current bankruptcy practice, I thought this was interesting.

I came across an article in the New York Times, published on November 14, 2014, with the following interesting paragraph:

One of the most abjectly false narratives about the financial crisis is that risky mortgages proliferated so that people who couldn’t afford homes could nonetheless buy them. Modern subprime lending was not about homeownership. Instead, the 1990s crop of subprime mortgage makers allowed people with bad credit to borrow against the equity in their existing homes. According to a joint HUD-Treasury report published in 2000, by 1999, a staggering 82 percent of subprime mortgages were refinancings, and in nearly 60 percent of those cases, the borrower pulled out cash, adding to his debt burden. The report noted that “relatively few subprime mortgages are used to purchase a house.”

The full article can be accessed at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/opinion/a-house-is-not-a-credit-card.html?_r=0